“Fractional owners share one specific jet with a few other people.”

A fractional programme sells shares of aircraft in 50-hour increments: a 1/16th share is about 50 hours a year, a 1/8th about 100, up to a half share. You pay a purchase price for the share, a monthly management fee, and an hourly rate when you fly. The programme guarantees an aircraft with a few hours' notice, almost anywhere in the operating region.

To make that guarantee, the operator pools every owner's aircraft and dispatches by proximity and availability. NetJets' 'interchange' rules also let you fly a larger or smaller aircraft than the one you own, with the hours adjusted. Owners of a Phenom 300 share may find themselves in a Citation Latitude on a busy day. That flexibility is why fractional works and why the specific aircraft you 'own' is mostly relevant at resale, when the programme buys the share back at a depreciated value.

There are smaller 'co-ownership' arrangements — three or four people sharing one aircraft they manage themselves — where the rumour is accurate. Those exist, especially with turboprops, but they aren't what people mean when they say 'fractional', and they come with the scheduling fights the big programmes were invented to prevent.