Spend management platform MySky today rolled out its new MySky Budget tool to help aircraft owners and operators to more accurately assess annual costs. Harnessing the data about multiple operating costs it has collected since launching its main spend management tool, the company is using artificial intelligence and modeling techniques to generate accurate projections that enable clients to generate meaningful budgets and give a higher degree of control over expenses.
MySky offers two versions of the budget tool. The “light” option is specific to a particular aircraft model, while a more sophisticated “pro” option is calibrated to be specific to an individual aircraft tail number.
The tool makes its calculations on historical cost data and also by assessing average costs based on trends it has seen with individual suppliers and services providers, such as FBOs, catering companies, hotels, and car rental providers. MySky claims the new system draws on more than 30 million “operationally sensitive and financially validated” data points from across the business aviation supply chain that it has gathered since the main platform was launched in 2015. Its platform is now supporting more than 400 business aircraft worldwide.
“We have learned how to predict the behavior of suppliers without contacting them and so we can mimic what on average they will charge in the future without asking, and we can produce budget data from this based on an operator’s geographical preferences for flights,” explained MySky co-founder Chris Marich.
Through MySky’s partnership with charter marketplace Avinode, the budget tool can also help aircraft owners assess the degree to which they can offset fixed costs by making their assets available for third-party flights. The system can predict typical rates of demand in different regions and at various times of the year, as well as average charter rates for these trips.
MySky’s cost inputs cover everything from maintenance requirements for each aircraft and crew salaries to fuel prices (based on the company’s partnership with the S&P Global Platts database). Its budget tool adjusts these to take into account pricing variations around the world, including the highly localized nature of the business aviation support sector.
The predictive cost function can be used as a standalone tool, for instance by some considering their first aircraft acquisition, or be integrated with the MySky spend management platform. The latter is intended to greatly reduce the burden of managing expenditure associated with aircraft operations and give customers the information they need to identify instances where costs are excessive or wasteful.
“For too long there has been a knowledge gap for private jet owners about the real cost of aircraft ownership that goes beyond asset acquisition,” Marich said. “Budget replaces outdated and legacy databases to provide owners with accurate financial insight, as well as allowing them to analyze costs between any aircraft type, whether new or preowned. Furthermore, it supports operators and aircraft management companies with reconciling running costs to owners.”