Wheels Up replaces jets, revenue and loss down, raises new debt

• $168.9m revenue, down 5% compared with the first quarter of 2025.
• Wheels Up jet fleet doubles year-on-year to 36 Challengers and Phenom 300s, replacing Hawker 400XPs and Citation Xs.
• Delta-led loan for $100m, plus Sankaty Jet Capital providing mezzanine financing worth $165m.
• Total gross bookings — including off-fleet charter — up 10% year-on-year to $267.2m.
• Adjusted EBITDAR loss of $18.3m, a 2% improvement on last year.

Wheels Up posted a net loss of $83m in the first quarter of 2026, on revenue of $168.9m. This was down 5% compared to the same quarter last year, as the company completed its fleet overhaul 18 months ahead of schedule.

“We’ve crossed the inflection point,” George Mattson, CEO, Wheels Up, told Corporate Jet Investor (CJI). “We’ve gotten to the other side of the transformation plan that we put in place two and a half years ago.”

The company also closed a $100m loan led by Delta and an innovative mezzanine financing with Sankaty Jet Capital, part of AIP Capital.

Wheels Up made a net loss of $83m during the first quarter of 2026 compared to $99m in the same quarter of 2025. It had adjusted EBITDAR of -$18.3m compared to -$18.7m in 2025. Q1 is historically its weakest quarter.

Replacing jets
Wheels Up has now sold its legacy Citation X and Hawker 400XP fleet. It had originally planned to dispose of these over the next 18 months. It was operating 36 Phenom 300 and Challenger 300 aircraft at the end of March 2025, up from 21 a year earlier. Wheels Up plans to double its owned fleet by the end of this year.

“The market led us there. We were getting very strong demand signals that people really liked what we were doing, so we had an accelerated adoption and accelerated growth of that fleet on the back of the demand,” says Mattson.

Wheels Up continues to operate King Airs. Mattson says that the new jets are cheaper to operate and far more reliable than the aircraft they replace. Its completion rate reached 98.9%, up two percentage points year-on-year. On-time performance hit 82.7%, up more than eight points. “Running two scaled fleets that are highly reliable and highly efficient takes a lot of operating costs out of the business,” said Mattson.

Delta and Sankaty financing
Wheels Up announced two new finance commitments. Delta led a new $100m term loan from existing investors, which could be increased to $200m. “Wheels Up’s momentum continues to build, and this financing reflects our confidence in the path ahead for our partnership,” said Ed Bastian, CEO, Delta Air Lines, in a statement.

The operator also agreed an innovative mezzanine financing with Sankaty Jet Capital, part of AIP Capital. The mezzanine has been added to a $332m facility that Wheels Up closed with Bank of America in November 2024. It will free up $165m of extra liquidity and can be used to finance new aircraft. This is Sankaty Jet Capital’s first jet financing since it launched in October 2025.

Gross bookings up 10%
Mattson said the decline in revenue was a result of winding down its legacy flying rather than softness in demand for its services.

“You might look at our revenue number and say: ‘down 5%, that’s not that exciting’. But what’s happening underneath is our Phenom and Challenger revenue more than doubled, and then we managed the orderly reduction in our legacy flying to basically offset that within a few percentage points,” says Mattson.

The strong growth in Phenom and Challenger revenue was largely offset by the planned reduction in legacy fleet revenue — a trade-off Mattson describes as intentional and now essentially complete.

Total gross bookings, which show the full gross spend on private jet services including charter and cargo, rose 10% to $267.2m. Private jet gross bookings per live flight leg jumped 32% to $24,786, reflecting the shift to higher-value aircraft and customers.

Gross loss at the end of the quarter was $2m, impacted by approximately $5m of fleet modernisation and legacy retirement costs. Adjusted contribution came in at $14.8m, with an adjusted contribution margin of 8.7%, versus 12.6% in Q1 2025.

According to Mattson, roughly five percentage points of that pressure came from the prior-year sale of non-core services businesses (including Baines Simmons and Clockwork) and inefficiencies from running multiple fleets during the transition.

The company believes the underlying margin was ahead of last year. “Those costs hit an apex in Q1,” Mattson tells CJI. “We think the fundamental business contribution margin was ahead of last year’s, but for these transitory inefficiencies.”

Total costs and expenses fell 12% compared to the same quarter in 2025 to $226.3m. General and administrative costs dropped 53% to $26.8m.

Signature Membership growing
Wheels Up’s Signature Membership programme, launched in September 2025 as the successor to the legacy offering, now has more than 800 members, representing roughly a third of the total membership base after just seven months in market.

With the fleet transformation complete, Mattson said growth for the company will be driven by scaling the Signature programme and expanding the fleet to meet demand, rather than chasing supply.

“We’ve only been doing Signature for seven months,” he tells CJI. “We have a plan for how many aircraft we’re going to buy every month, every quarter. Demand is ahead, so we’d be going faster.”

The corporate segment, he added, is another bright spot for the business, up 25% year-on-year. He said the shift to a single fleet and single programme had removed the complexity which hindered growth momentum. “Now that it’s all clear and we’re only selling one thing, and that one thing is exactly what customers buy on the corporate side, we’re seeing very strong demand signals for what we’re doing,” said Mattson.

Turnaround at inflection point
As a listed company Wheels Up still needs to report quarterly figures, but Mattson says they are not running the business short-term.

“We are managing to a vision of an end state for what this business is capable of doing. So the question becomes, if we make the right decisions today, what does that look like in a couple of years and beyond?” says Mattson. “I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about this quarter. Some 90% of my investors are sitting in the boardroom with me. What is it worth in two years? What’s it worth in five years? What is it worth in 10 years? Not tomorrow, or today, or yesterday. We are just executing a plan. And if that plan is successful, I imagine that the investors of all types will be happy over time.”

Mattson joined Wheels Up as CEO in September 2023 when Delta Air Lines, Certares Management and Knighthead Capital Management came in as investors.

“It’s hard to say any moment is the end of the restructuring. I would say it’s the inflection point. We’ve crossed the inflection point,” says Mattson. “We still have to sunset legacy programmes and do some other things that will fade in materiality with time, but I would say we have definitely turned the corner and gotten to the other side of the transformation plan that we put in place two and a half years ago.”