Sky Harbour CEO on Hangar Shortages, Ground Leases, and Wall Street

Every general aviation airport in America is owned by a city or a county, and almost none of them can afford to build you a hangar. That is not a market failure. That is the system working exactly as it was designed.This week on The VIP Seat, Jessie and Preston sit down with Tal Kenan, Founder and CEO of Sky Harbour, the publicly traded company building hangar campuses at airports where almost nobody can get land.Tal grew up in military aviation, spent a decade running an investment firm between Tel Aviv and New York, then bought a Beech Baron and ran head first into the same hangar shortage everyone complains about. Instead of joining the waitlist, he went and read the FAA grant assurance guidelines. What came out of that is a real estate business that takes no transient traffic, charges a serious premium, and has a waiting list at most of its campuses.They cover:• Why the hangar shortage is a policy artifact, not a supply and demand accident• How FBO economics quietly guarantee more ramp and less hangar space• What it actually takes to win a ground lease on an airport, and why PDK took six years• Why fuel and hangar have to be priced as a single number, not two• How tax exempt private activity bonds fixed at 4.18% underpin the entire model• Where the bond market and the equity market disagree about what this business is worth• What a "home base operator" is, and why the FBO world is splitting in two• The SPAC story, the REIT question, and why he is happy being public about five days out of sevenSupply is fixed, the fleet keeps getting bigger, and nobody is building new airports. This is the conversation about what happens next.Thanks to AB Jets and Real Jet for sponsoring this season of The VIP Seat.Subscribe to the newsletter at thevipseat.comJessie Naor: flyingprivate.org | flyvizor.comPreston Holland: prestigefinance.com | prestonholland.comDisclosure: Sky Harbour is a publicly traded company. Jessie Naor has a small personal investment in it, which she discloses on the show. Nothing in this episode is investment advice and should be viewed for entertainment purposes only.