October 2015 Newsletter

Fueling Your Jet Has Been Getting Cheaper – Is That About to Change?

I’m pretty sure no one has ever said, “Gosh, look at how cheap jet fuel is!” The cost of Jet A is a big driver of the cost of flying privately, and no matter what the c

urrent price is, we’d all like it to be lower still.  That said, the past twelve months have not been bad to us – Jet A prices have declined 16%, year over year, as the chart indicates:

We at Jet Advisors have seen the same overall declining trend in our own FuelTraq^(TM)  fuel price database.  However, we track bulk/fleet purchase prices, rather than the retail prices above.  We built the database so we would have hard data that would let us advise our clients what kind of prices they should expect a diligent aircraft manager to be able to achieve for them.  Over the past twelve months, our data shows an average savings of over $1.50 per gallon was available vs retail.

Another thing we see in our data is substantially more volatility in prices, even though the trend line is the same.  In particular, our data indicates a sharp  uptick in prices in September, which does not appear in the chart above.  Since our data sources are worldwide, not just U.S., I’m left wondering if this is just volatility, or if it is a leading indicator that the pleasant downward motion in fuel prices has just come to a screeching halt?

As always, time will tell.  I’ll be back with an update on this topic in a few months.