Contract aviation fuel for business jets

Every Jet-A1 quote we issue is decomposed into the Platts reference (Mean of Platts Arab Gulf or Mean of Platts Europe, depending on station), the supplier differential, into-plane fee, airport throughput, taxes and any volumetric rebate. The operator sees the same stack we see; nothing is buried in a single per-USG number.

When the market moves intraday — and during Saudi or Russian product disruption it moves several times — we requote rather than honour a stale number that will be reversed at invoice. The audit trail goes back to the Platts assessment used at the time of release.

At hubs with major fuel suppliers the cleanest mechanism is a fuel release against an LFS contract: the fueller bills our account, we invoice the operator at the negotiated differential, and there is no card scheme markup in the middle. At fields without a contract supplier we use UVAir, AEG and Colt cards in that order based on station acceptance.

Tankering decisions are made on a net-cost basis that includes the burn penalty of carrying extra fuel, ramp-temperature density loss, and the differential at both ends. A naive 'always tanker when origin is cheaper' rule loses money on two-thirds of long legs once burn is priced in correctly.

At OMDB and OMAA the into-plane fee is meaningful and varies by handler. At OBBI the picture is simpler because the contract pool is small. At OTHH the airport throughput charge sits inside the Qatar-Fuel posted price and is not separately negotiable. At OEJN and OERK the Saudi Aramco mechanism prices in local riyal with USD settlement and there is a working-day lag on the final invoice. We track each of these so the operator's accounting team is not surprised at month-end.

Curfews and slot constraints at OMDB sometimes force a fuel pickup at OMDW or OMAA instead. The dispatch sheet shows the net cost of each option, including the additional handling fee at the alternate, so the captain can decide on a basis other than 'whichever is closest'.

Every release ticket records the bowser reference, density at uplift temperature and any water-detection check performed. At LFS-operated stations these are double-checked against the supplier's quality control log. When density is materially off the published value we hold the uplift, escalate to the supplier and document the resolution before the aircraft departs.

Volume reconciliation is done at receipt of the ticket, not at month-end. A litres-to-USG conversion error or a missing into-plane fee is caught while the trip is still active and corrected against the release, not back-billed weeks later.

Operators with a fleet of two or more aircraft get a monthly fuel report showing burn per leg, price per USG against the Platts reference for that day, and variance against a rolling thirty-day average. Trends — a station drifting expensive, a route burning more than the OFP suggests, a supplier differential creeping up — are surfaced before the next month's contract review.

For owners running an aircraft inside an operator's AOC, the same report can be issued at the tail level so the cost is allocated cleanly between hours flown and external charters.