Wheels Up and flyExclusive report confident Q1 results

opinion

by Fayaz Hussain

May 18, 2026

Wheels Up and flyExclusive both reported their results this week. They were different but both upbeat.

The first three months of the year for charter is not a forgiving period. It is a quarter you survive rather than celebrate. Leisure demand slows down after the holidays and corporate budgets are still warming up. Wheels Up and flyExclusive both reported their results this week. They were different but both upbeat.

flyExclusive is celebrating. The quarter ended with CEO Jim Segrave saying: ‘I told you so’ after spending most of the past two years highlighting the merits of undertaking fleet transformation. In Q1 this year, it seems as if this is finally starting to pay off.

Revenues climbed 9% year-over-year to $96.3m. Gross profit surged 69% to $19m. And for the first time (since it went public), the company’s first-quarter adjusted EBITDA was positive. At $200,000 it was not huge. But this is compared with a loss of $6.4m last year. “That was not accidental,” Segrave said. “It was not a function of favourable seasonality. In fact, it was in spite of seasonality.”

The engine driving this growth was the removal of non-performing aircraft. Segrave said these older aircraft were costing more than $3m a month in losses at the start of 2024. Since then, they have so far removed 31 of these aircraft and replaced them with newer Challengers, CJ3s and Citation XLS variants, which carry contribution margins of 27% to 39% per aircraft.

“We have now proven that our transformation plan will deliver the financial performance we forecasted,” said Segrave. Dispatch availability improved 760 basis points. Flight hours rose 7% despite fewer aircraft.

“We continue to generate more revenue, more flight activity and significantly more profitability from a smaller, more efficient and higher-performing fleet,” said chief financial officer Brad Garner. Segrave is already looking ahead: “We are halfway through the quarter and expect to deliver around 15% top-line growth quarter-to-quarter.”

Reading Wheels Up results requires two lenses. One lens shows revenue fell 5% to $169m, net loss was $83m while the contribution margin dropped to 8.7%. The picture is slightly different with lens two: gross bookings grew 10%. Phenom and Challenger revenues more than doubled. Fleet transition was completed 18 months ahead of schedule. And another $165m in new financing was secured. Both readings are accurate.

The company was, as CEO George Mattson explained to CJI, “Running six fleets, plus the King Airs” in the first quarter while absorbing peak transition costs. “We definitely turned the corner and hit the inflection on the transformation,” he said.

Mattson added that the transition costs took away five percentage points of margin in the quarter. Exempting for that, the underlying performance was ahead of the prior year. The completion rate stood at 98.9% and the three-plus-hour delay rate fell from 5% to 2%. There were 44 zero-cancellation ‘Brand Days’ in the quarter.

Mattson was direct on where he sees growth next: “Our corporate segment is the fastest growing segment of our customer segmentation, growing 25% a year.” He said it’s a lot easier to market with a dedicated go-to market strategy. Wheels Up’s Signature membership hit 844 members in seven months.

“You have to start with a great product, but then once you have a great product, you have to wrap an experience around it. The product itself isn’t enough,” he said. The $100m term loan led by Delta plus $65m in mezzanine aircraft financing capacity via AIP Capital funds a plan to roughly double the premium fleet in 2026.

Here is to the next quarter.