The metal leg of the folding chair screeched against the linoleum floor, a sound like a hawk hitting a plate-glass window. It was the kind of noise that only happens in a room that is too quiet, too poorly lit, and filled with people who would rather be almost anywhere else. The air in the county annex building smelled of industrial lemon cleaner and the faint, wet wool of damp coats. It was 7:14 PM on a Tuesday, the time when municipal reality usually grinds to its slowest, most bureaucratic halt.

In the front of the room, a commissioner with a tie that had seen better decades peered over his reading glasses. He was holding a sheet of paper-the monthly airport activity report. He cleared his throat and noted, with the flat cadence of a man reading a grocery list, that fuel flowage at the regional airport was down 4.2% for the quarter. He looked toward the third row, where an FBO owner sat with a leather folder balanced on his knees, and asked if the airport was “sliding into a period of decline.”

The owner, a man who had spent thirty-one years building a business out of asphalt and high-octane kerosene, felt the weight of the folder. Inside it were the real numbers. His hangar occupancy was at 100%, and he had a waiting list twelve names long. His revenue from hangar rentals was up 19% because he had transitioned his tenant base from aging piston singles to two light jets and a turboprop. His margins on maintenance had widened. His net operating income had never been healthier.

But there was no line on the commissioner’s agenda for “leasehold quality” or “net income.” There was only the gallon.

The owner opened his mouth to explain that a gallon of Jet-A sold to a transient Citation is not the same economic unit as the rent paid by a long-term tenant in a heated 12,000-square-foot hangar. He wanted to say that the “decline” the commissioner saw was actually a strategic shedding of low-margin volume in favor of high-stability infrastructure. Instead, he looked at the eleven bored faces in the folding chairs, realized they were speaking a language that only had one word-volume-and he stayed silent. He closed his folder and drove home in the dark.

This is the central paradox of the general aviation industry. The only number the government consistently tracks, reports, and argues about is the gallon. Because public data is volumetric, the entire conversation about what an FBO is worth has become volumetric. We have made the two most durable components of modern FBO value-the hangar and the leasehold-nearly invisible.

The Residue of Measurement

I spent nearly an hour this morning picking damp coffee grounds out from under the keys of my keyboard with a toothpick and a canister of compressed air. It was a messy, frustrating consequence of a momentary lapse in spatial awareness. As I dug a stubborn clump out from under the “F” key, I realized that FBO data suffers from the same problem.

We are trying to type out a clear picture of a multi-million dollar business, but the interface is gummed up with the “residue” of what’s easy to measure. We look at the flowage fee because it’s the only thing that leaves a visible trail in the public record.

The FAA counts “based aircraft” on Form 5010, but anyone who has ever walked a ramp knows that those numbers are often as accurate as a weather forecast from three weeks ago. State Departments of Transportation track fuel taxes because that’s how they fund the runways. Consequently, when a city council or an airport board looks at their FBO, they don’t see a complex real estate and service play. They see a gas station with wings.

The Volumetric Trap

This “volumetric trap” has infected the way owners view their own exits. I have sat in hangars from Oregon to Georgia where the owner starts the conversation with, “We pumped 800,000 gallons last year.” It’s a point of pride, a measure of hustle. But 800,000 gallons of low-margin contract fuel sold to a fractional fleet is a completely different animal than 400,000 gallons sold at retail to based tenants who also pay $5,000 a month in rent.

The government doesn’t care about that distinction. To the tax man, a gallon is a gallon. But to a buyer-specifically the institutional buyers and private equity platforms currently rolling up the map-the gallon is often the least interesting part of the equation.

“The city thinks the airport is a bucket. They just want to know how much liquid is in it at the end of the month.”

– Miller, former airport manager

That mindset ignores the fact that the bucket itself-the hangars, the shops, the offices, and the ground beneath them-is the actual asset.

When you look at the mechanics of an acquisition, you see the danger of this invisibility. If an FBO is valued purely on a multiple of its total EBITDA, and that EBITDA is heavily weighted toward fuel sales, the valuation is fragile. Fuel margins are subject to the whims of global oil markets, the pricing strategies of neighboring airports, and the contractual demands of fuel cards.

Hangar rent, however, is a different beast. It is “sticky.” It is a real estate play embedded within an aviation business. In many markets, the demand for hangar space has decoupled from the price of fuel. People will keep their airplanes in a secure, well-maintained facility even if the cost of a cross-country trip goes up by twenty percent. Yet, because there is no national database for hangar lease rates, and because your city council doesn’t get a “hangar flowage fee,” this revenue stream is often treated as secondary.

This disconnect is where value is either lost or found. If you are an owner preparing for a transition, you have to do the work the government refuses to do. You have to normalize your earnings to show that while the “gallons” might be flat, the “quality” of those gallons has improved. You have to demonstrate that your leasehold-the number of years left on your agreement with the airport-is the true ceiling of your business value.

The True Ceiling of Value

The leasehold is perhaps the most invisible asset of all. You can pump ten million gallons a year, but if you have only four years left on your lease and no option to renew, your business is a depreciating asset rapidly approaching zero. Conversely, an FBO pumping a modest 200,000 gallons with a thirty-five-year lease and a master-plan-approved site for three new hangars is a gold mine.

The public record won’t show that. The state aviation economic impact study won’t show that. Those documents will simply show two dots on a map with different fuel totals.

When an owner looks at their P&L, they see the complexity of the operation, but when they prepare for a sale, they often find that the market uses a lens that is far more sophisticated than the one used by the local airport board. This is where professional

FBO Appraisals

become the bridge between what the government tracks and what a buyer actually pays for. It is the process of stripping away the volumetric noise to reveal the underlying structural value of the lease, the dirt, and the exclusivity.

Yield Per Acre

We have spent twenty years of policy and pricing following the instrument rather than the economics. We’ve built “fuel-centric” businesses because that’s what the landlord wanted to talk about. But the most successful operators I know-the ones who eventually sell for multiples that make their neighbors’ eyes water-are the ones who stopped obsessing over the meter and started obsessing over the square foot.

They realized that the FBO business is actually a game of “yield per acre.” Fuel is just one way to harvest that yield. Hangars are another. Maintenance is a third. But the common denominator isn’t the gallon; it’s the control of the ramp.

If you rely on the government’s portrait of your business, you will always be undervalued. You will be seen as a commodity provider in a cyclical market. You’ll be the guy in the third row of the budget hearing, silent while someone who doesn’t know the difference between a pitot tube and a pylon tells you your business is “declining” because a flight school moved three planes to the next county.

The reality is that we are in a transition period for general aviation. The fleet is getting heavier, more expensive, and more demanding. These aircraft don’t just need fuel; they need infrastructure. They need the very things that don’t show up on a flowage report.

As I finally got the last of those coffee grounds out of my keyboard, the keys started to click with their original, crisp resonance again. It’s a small thing, but it changed the way the machine felt. It worked the way it was designed to work.

Valuing an FBO requires the same kind of meticulous cleaning. You have to get the “volumetric residue” out of the mechanism. You have to look past the gallons and see the hangar doors, the lease terms, and the margin per transaction. Only then do you stop being a gas station and start being a strategic asset.

The drive home from that Tuesday night meeting is always the longest part of the week. You pass the airport perimeter fence, see the blue taxiway lights glowing in the dark, and you know that what’s happening inside those hangars is far more valuable than the number on the commissioner’s spreadsheet. The government might only track the gallons, but the market tracks the truth. And the truth is that you can’t fly a jet without a place to put it, and you can’t build a legacy on a flowage report.

The next time you find yourself looking at a state-issued report on “Aviation Trends,” remember that you are looking at a shadow on the wall. It’s an interesting shadow, sure, but it’s not the object casting it. Your value isn’t liquid; it’s solid. It’s built into the terms of your lease, the height of your ceilings, and the loyalty of the people who pay you to keep their investments dry.

Don’t let a volumetric conversation dictate a strategic outcome. The gallon is a hollow unit of measurement in a world that is increasingly defined by the strength of the anchor. Use the data that matters, even if you’re the only one in the room who knows where to find it.