Aviation Business Is His Prop

By Robert Ross

martin petera left with business partner

Martin Petera (left) with Adam Bilek, his partner in Prop-Jets, an air charter company they operate in Prague, Czech Republic.
Photo by Tomas Maly

Martin Petera isn’t majoring in business at Embry-Riddle to learn how to make money.

At 19, the 6-foot-6-inch freshman with a boyish grin already has a proven talent for doing that. For the past three years, Petera, from the Czech Republic, has started one lucrative business venture after another.

His latest is Prop-Jet, a charter company that flies business people and the wealthy to and from Prague. Last summer, his leased jets kept busy ferrying Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and other stars that were shooting films in Prague, one of Hollywood’s hottest new movie locales.

“For one production,” Petera says, “we flew Vin Diesel and two bodyguards from Prague to Sweden in a Falcon 2000, a director and producer in a Hawker 800XP, the makeup people and artists in a Saab 340, and 1,200 pounds of cargo in another Saab 340.”

So why is Petera, who can afford to expense-account his tuition and fees, studying for a degree in aviation business at Embry-Riddle’s Daytona Beach, Fla., campus? “I was always on the phone when I was in high school. I was so busy,” Petera says. “Plus, we lost a lot of money on one contract.”

Petera started his first business in high school after learning how easy it was to find a hotel online for a family vacation to London. With a $3,000 loan from his parents, he created a hotel-booking Web site and began charging less than half of the standard 15-percent commission. He also handled visitors’ transportation between the airport and hotel and for sightseeing.

He had contracts with 70 hotels when he turned 17, but rising competition and costs eventually forced him to close up shop. “Paying $1,000 per click to advertise on Google was bad,” he says. “Plus, Hotels.com, Yahoo.hotels, and other Web sites with deep pockets were pushing the commission rates down.”

Petera was flying ultra light planes for fun when a friend who was studying at Embry-Riddle told him about the university. The next summer, he attended Embry-Riddle’s Summer Academy in Daytona Beach to obtain his flight instrument ratings, with his eye on an eventual career as an airline pilot.

When he returned to Prague, he got the idea for his Prop-Jet charter service and partnered with the owner of a local flying school. He linked his Web site with the largest search site in the country and “five days later the fourth-richest man in the Czech Republic wanted us to fly him from Prague to Dubrovnik, in Croatia,” Petera says. “After that, boom!, the phone started ringing.”

Petera would like to eventually own the planes his company flies, but he no longer wants to be an airline pilot. Business just keeps getting in the way. “I see these ideas, and I wonder: why doesn’t anybody else do it? It’s so easy and obvious,” he says, and then he smiles. “But I keep the details to myself.”

# # # Photo caption: Martin Petera (left) with Adam Bilek, his partner in Prop-Jets, an air charter company they operate in Prague, Czech Republic. [Photo by Tomas Maly]