Eureka: How founder Alex Wilcox got innovative hop-on jet service JSX off the ground

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies, and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Alex Wilcox is the founder and CEO of JSX, a US regional air carrier based in Dallas that offers a distinctive hop-on, hop-off jet service. Positioned between commercial airlines and private jets, JSX promises the convenience of private aviation without the sky-high price tags. With minimal wait times, private terminals, and a streamlined boarding process, JSX has carved out something of a distinctive niche in the skies.

0:51But how do you build an airline around airports most carriers overlook? And what does it take to change how people think about short-haul flying? Well, here is Alex with more on how it all got off the ground.

1:09We do what we call public charter, and that is what we call a hop-on-hop-off jet service. Essentially, it's the third way to travel by air. So you can travel, obviously, commercially, buy a ticket on any airline. You can fly by private jet, whether you own the jet yourself or whether you charter a fraction with one of the bigger operators. And that's typically been the way that people get around, either private planes or commercial airplanes. And obviously, commercial's got a much better price point, but it has its inconveniences. And flying privately is nothing but convenient, except it's extremely expensive.

1:41So we're trying to create the third thing, which is neither private jet nor a commercial airplane. But we want the price point more or less of a commercial aircraft, but we want the convenience, particularly on the ground of a private jet. Actually, in flight, in many ways, we're better than smaller private jets. So the basic unique proposition that we have is that you can show up 20 minutes before the flight when you fly on JSX and get on the airplane and go without breaking a sweat. We do that by flying from private terminals, typically our own terminals, or a fixed-based operator, where the private jets depart from, and avoiding the crowds.

2:13And our airplanes only seat 30 passengers as well, so there'll never be more than 29 other people on the airplane. And so it's kind of a shared private jet experience, if you like. I mean, the reason that we embedded airplanes in the first place is to get from point A to point B faster. And anything that gets in the way of that, the incentives for commercial airports are all upside down. The commercial airport actually makes more money the longer you spend in the terminal. And that's why, you know, the larger airports are beginning to look more like shopping malls than terminals, aren't they? So what we do is we essentially try to take the airport out of it.

2:44And so we don't have very plush and commodious lounges. We just have a nice place to sit for a few minutes while you're waiting. And we encourage people not to show up too early for the flight, because, again, the point is to keep on moving from point A to point B. So by disintermediating the airport, if you like, we achieve a much better result for our customer, which is just a seamless experience. 90 % of the U.S. population lives within 15 minutes of an airport, but only, you know, I think 76 % of the U.S. population lives within 30 minutes of an airport served by an airline. For the vast majority of people, it's a much more convenient thing to be able to use your local airport.

3:16We actually started in Southern California, and so our biggest operation is Southern California and Las Vegas markets. You know, we've got 14 flights a day, for example, between Burbank, California, just north of LA, and Las Vegas, for example. But we fly in Southern California, Orange County, Carlsbad, which is just north of San Diego. In Northern California, we're in Monterey. We're in Oakland. We're in Concord, the East Bay, just north of there. Nevada, we're in Reno. And then, of course, a lot of those markets fly directly to Las Vegas, where we've got 200 flights a day on certain days. We fly to some very unique destinations.

3:49Like we go to Lajitas in West Texas, which is a private golf resort. It's actually a private airport. Places the airlines cannot take you, which is another important point. There are 5 ,000 airports in the United States available for airplanes, publicly funded airports. Of those 5 ,000, a mere 480, 480 are served by the commercial airlines. And so if you want to access to 90 % of the airports in the U.S. that are publicly funded, you actually have to have access to private aviation or you can fly at JSX. So examples of places that we fly where the airlines don't include Lajitas, include Tauro, New Mexico, Scottsdale, as opposed to going to a massive Phoenix airport, you can just go to Scottsdale right next to the resorts where you want to go.

4:30Destin Executive Airport, Naples Airport in South Florida, Miami Opelika Airport, the private airport, not the big Miami International. So, you know, roughly half of our markets are to and from places that the big airlines are not even permitted to fly in the first place. I've had the pleasure of working for three of the, and maybe the only three, successful airline entrepreneurs of our time, you know, starting with Branson. I also interned for Herb Keldher here at Southwest Airlines back in the 1900s, 1992. And then I worked for David Nealman at Caprice. But getting back to Virgin Atlantic, I looked after product development and two things I learned from Richard.

5:04One is the value of getting PR, free PR. When you're a little guy and you don't have the marketing budgets of the major airlines, you've got to get attention any way you can. And he's obviously famous for that. And then the other thing was the focus on innovation. They developed, under Richard's guidance, the clubhouse concept, which was extraordinary things that you've never seen before in a clubhouse. You get a massage, you can get a haircut, you can get all these luxurious things. But even then, I was obsessed with getting from point A to point B faster. And I lived in Connecticut at the time, which is where the U.S.

5:33headquarters at Virgin Atlantic was. I had to go to the UK a lot. It could be two hours getting from Connecticut down to JFK. And then once you land at Heathrow, it's another hour or two to get into town. So we said, what if we flew from Westchester County Airport, which is right next to Connecticut. And you could fly from there nonstop to London City Airport. And so if you're going to a meeting in the Docklands, you know, your commute's 10 minutes instead of two hours. We would do that with a, you know, a Gulf Stream, large Gulf Stream that could have maybe 16 lie flat beds in it. And we called it Beat the Concord Service, because if you were anywhere on the Gold Coast, anywhere sort of northern New York suburbs and southern Connecticut, going to anywhere, you know, near downtown or the Docklands in London, you would literally beat the Concord because you didn't have to have a two-hour drive to JFK, and you didn't have to have a two-hour drive from Heathrow.

6:19And so when you look at the door-to-door lapse time, it was going to be faster.

6:27United Airlines is an investor in JSX. JetBlue is an investor at JSX. Qatar Airways is an investor at JSX. Many of the major airlines support us in what we're doing. They don't see us as a competitive threat to them whatsoever. You know, honestly, we don't think too much about our competitors. I'm much more of the Jeff Bezos school of thought here, which is if you just obsess about your own customers experience, you constantly improve that, then your competitive issues will take care of themselves. We don't care about market share. We care about profitability. If we're profitable in the market, I don't care about 1 % of the market.

6:58We've got 100 % of the market. So that's really all I care about. Are we offering a profitable service that our customers love? And are we making it better for our customers every single month? As long as we obsess over our customers, the competitive issues will take care of themselves. We're looking at a different kind of airplane as well to comply into much smaller airports. and provide service to even more of those otherwise unserved airports. I think you will see some additional East Coast markets. And, you know, we're very heavy in New York to Florida right now, but we might add another market somewhere between those two, maybe closer to the nation's capital than not.

7:28And then I think there's a couple of new places that we can go to on the West Coast as well. I love both travel and to fly. And so, you know, this is obviously the industry for me. I think the most beautiful thing you can see as a human being is, you know, watching the sunset from the cockpit at 37 ,000 feet, headed west and is watching the planet change from light to dark. I think it's one of the most awe-inspiring things. And the blue sky turns into a pitch-black night and you see the stars that you can't see anywhere else. And it just reminds you, you know, how lucky we all are to be alive.

7:56To me, that's a beautiful moment to be human.

8:05That was Alex Wilcox, the founder and CEO of JSX. and you can learn more about the business by heading over to JSX.com. And that is all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. The programme's produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. Listen again and find out more at monocle.com or drop Laura a line if you'd like to get in touch with the team. She's on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.

8:39Thank you.