NAFA member Tripp Thurston, Chief Operating Officer at FLYING Finance, shares his latest article.
The business jet is the tool. The second hangar is the reason they learned to fly in the first place.
The longer I am in aviation, the more I find two hangar pilots. These are the ones that have the business jet on limited charter with the management company, and a second hangar at the local airstrip. It is the second hangar that catches my attention, because it is the aircraft in that second hangar that sparks the eye twinkling smiles and the rascally grins. The second hangar is not always as brightly lit or even as big, but it is where you find the aircraft the owner actually loves to fly: a Carbon Cub FX-3 and an RV-14 he built during the pandemic.
This is not an unusual story anymore. It is a generation.
The Aircraft You Show Off and the One You Actually Fly
There is a class of pilot — successful, accomplished, the kind whose company uses the jet for legitimate business travel — who keeps a second aircraft that no flight department will touch, that no scheduler will log, that exists entirely outside the operational framework of the primary aviation asset. It is the aircraft they fly when the office is not calling.
Sometimes it is a Carbon Cub fully optioned north of $400,000. Sometimes it is an SR22 left over from before the company grew to the point where a Pilatus, EPIC or Citation made more sense. Sometimes it is a Van’s RV-14 that lives in a T-hangar at a grass strip forty minutes from home. Sometimes it is a restored Bonanza that belonged to a grandfather.
What unifies them is not the aircraft type. It is what the aircraft represents. The jet is the tool. The other one is the reason they learned to fly in the first place. Welcome back to FLYING.
This article was originally published by FLYING Finance in 2026.