IN WHAT SEEMS LIKE A GAFFE TAKEN FROM HIS OWN SHOW, LARRY DAVID, THE WRITER AND CURMUDGEONLY ANTIHERO OF CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, HAS GONE TO THE WRONG AIRPORT-LAX RATHER THAN BURBANK.
“Excuse me for one second,” says Alex Wilcox, co-founder and CEO of the air carrier JSX, as we sit in a conference room in the company’s headquarters at Dallas’s Love Field, overlooking a spacious hangar filled with a handful of Embraer jets. He dials up the Burbank station manager. “Hey, Arya, you at the station?” he asks. An affirmative crackles from the phone. “Larry David apparently went to the wrong airport—can you hold until 8:05, 8:10? Don’t hold more than 8:15.” Ending the call, Wilcox smiles, a look of mild exasperation on his face that signals he’s experienced high-maintenance clients more than a few times in his business.
The moment almost perfectly encapsulates JSX, the public charter air service founded by Wilcox in California in 2015 and sitting somewhere in the regulatory muddle between private-jet travel and commercial flight. JSX has steadily added routes and gained enthusiastic customers and accolades in recent years. While hardly a household name, it’s been voted Travel+Leisure’s number-one domestic airline—thanks to an experience that hints at the private-jet lifestyle at a fraction of the price (but typically several times the cost of an equivalent economy seat on a traditional commercial airliner). JSX employs about 1,000 people, and flew some 36,000 flights in 2024. While the company does not disclose revenue, estimates put it comfortably in the nine figures.
JSX is expanding its reach at a time when air travel, with all its delays and high costs and strict security regimens, is filled with potential for the kind of social awkwardness that kept Curb ticking along for 12 seasons. (In one episode, David, forced to fly coach because of a missed flight, reluctantly swaps his aisle seat for a middle and then is subjected to a litany of personal-space invasions from his seatmates.)
JSX does things differently. For one, there are no boarding groups, and no TSA lines—no TSA at all. Domestic-flight customers show up 20 minutes before their departure times, sink into spacious seats with plenty of elbow room, and order from well-curated cocktail menus while using fast and stable Starlink Wi-Fi. There are no middle seats.
The routes are different too. JSX flies mostly out of FBOs (fixed-base operators), aviation lingo for the general aviation areas of airports that are home to corporate jets and flight schools. It tends to eschew the big airports like JFK and Denver International for more obscure facilities like New York’s Westchester County and Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Metropolitan. Small wonder David accidentally headed to the wrong place. Rather than bicoastal redeyes, JSX routes tend to be short and targeted (Burbank to Las Vegas, for instance).
While the JSX moniker derives from a progenitor company called JetSuiteX, these days the branding revolves around the phrase “joyfully simple Xperience.” And that, says Wilcox, is something sorely missing from much of air travel. “Just this notion that we have to have such a huge edifice between your car and the airplane,” he says. “Why do we make airports so complicated?” A trained pilot and lifelong aviation enthusiast, Wilcox speaks with the anguish of a spurned romantic. “Somehow the average speed of traveling by air has gone down every single decade,” he says. “Everything’s getting slower, everything’s getting harder, which is the opposite of what the future was supposed to be. That’s what we’re trying to fight to bring back.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/lg6LuT89W1741263126921.jpg]
JSX FLIGHTS FIT NO MORE THAN 30 PEOPLE AND APPROXIMATE THE PRIVATE-JET EXPERIENCE AT A FRACTION OF THE PRICE.
Of course, the flip side of all those stringent regulations is that, prior to the recent crash in D.C., commercial air travel was the safest it had been in more than a decade; in 2023, there was one serious incident for every 1.26 million flights. Wilcox, however, argues that some measures have outlived their relevance. “No one really cares that the security fence is eight feet tall or 10 feet tall,” he says. “That doesn’t make a difference to anybody except for maybe a bad guy who can’t afford a bigger ladder.”
With JSX, he has found a way, embedded in the regulations, of bringing aspects of private-jet travel—subject to less onerous rules than commercial aviation—to a larger public. In this, he fancies himself a populist of sorts, fighting not only government red tape but also entrenched companies like American and Southwest Airlines. He waves around a well-thumbed copy of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen’s iconic book. “My takeaway is that if you get to a certain size, you become the people you disrupted,” he says, adding, for good measure, a paraphrase from the Batman movie The Dark Knight: “If you don’t die a hero, you live long enough to become the villain.” Few would argue with his diagnosis that commercial air travel has become a slog. But it's another question altogether whether his remedy is righteously or cynically opportunistic.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/xSLfBZgZl1741263181598.jpg]
As former TSA administrator John Pistole announced to the whole industry in a Travel Weekly op-ed, “It appears JSX may be exploiting the government's security regulatory procedures by implementing a business plan for which the policymakers at the FAA and TSA didn't plan.”
JetBlue founder David Neeleman, a JSX investor and one of the most admired innovators in the airline industry's recent history, calls that line of criticism “totally maddening.” And he marvels at Wilcox's chops as an operator. “It's remarkable really, when you think about all the airlines that lose money and all the ones that go out of business, that he has been able to make it not only survive but thrive.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/4172174729.jpg]
In Dallas, Wilcox gets a text. Larry David made the flight. All is well, for the moment. But JSX, a plucky upstart in a notoriously volatile industry, whose business model is based on navigating a very specific set of regulatory parameters, may be facing a more turbulent future.
Hang around airports and airplanes long enough and you'll notice that people don't usually just happen into the industry. Aviation attracts enthusiasts and dreamers. “The failure rate is pretty high, and the challenges are non-stop,” Wilcox says. “If you’re just a mercenary CEO, this isn’t the industry for you.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/7114441171.jpg]
Growing up in New York City with an American father and a Swiss mother, Wilcox flew overseas regularly to visit grandparents in his formative years. “The colors we chose for JSX are not dissimilar to Swiss Air’s,” he notes. He got his pilot’s license at age 17 and fueled airplanes in Burlington, Vermont, while studying English and political science at the University of Vermont. During an unpaid internship in the early '90s with Southwest Airlines, he met Herb Kelleher, the company’s legendary co-founder. Later he worked at Virgin Atlantic under Richard Branson, where he met Neeleman, who would go on to launch JetBlue in 1998 and hire Wilcox as its first full-time employee. “I got exposure to three people who’d actually done the impossible and started airlines,” he says.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/7277717741.jpg]
RIGHT FROM TOP: JETBLUE FOUNDER AND JSX INVESTOR DAVID NEELEMAN, VIRGIN ATLANTIC FOUNDER RICHARD BRANSON, AND SOUTHWEST CO-FOUNDER HERB KELLEHER, ALL OF WHOM WILCOX WORKED FOR ON HIS WAY TO STARTING JSX.
After helping launch Kingfisher, a groundbreaking and embattled low-cost Indian carrier, Wilcox found himself back in the States, drafting a business plan for a prospective private-jet charter company based in Las Vegas. That eventually led to his helming a company called JetSuite—until the market plummeted in the pandemic. The experience soured him on the private-aviation industry, which he describes with characteristic bluntness as “an awful, awful business.” The field is littered, he says, “with rampant examples of companies starting to scale and then running out of cash.” What galled him the most was the inefficiency. “Close to half of the private-jet flights that fly on any given day are empty,” he says. “They’re dropping someone off at point A and then going to pick somebody up at point B.”
But he was struck by another curious aspect of private-aviation economics. He’d watch people pay several thousand dollars to fly for 45 minutes when Southwest would do it for $200, and he couldn’t help asking why it was worth the money. “I don’t want to take off my shoes,” he’d hear. “I don’t want to wait for 160 other people to get on and off the airplane. I don’t want to spend an hour and a half at an airport.”
And so JetSuiteX was born, with the goal of producing a private-jet experience at a more commercial price point. It launched in 2016 with just two routes: Concord, California, to Burbank; and Burbank to Las Vegas.
Today JSX flies 46 planes between 25 markets. The process the company uses to pick routes is, Wilcox says, “very manual.” JSX tends to follow the money—for instance, flying between New York’s Westchester County and Boca Raton, Florida. “I couldn’t care less what my market share is,” Wilcox says. “All I care about is whether I can profitably fill my airplane.”
Another market niche for JSX is routes not served by the majors: Taos, New Mexico, for example, where an airline run by the Taos Ski Valley resort folded last year, leaving the town without an air link to Denver. Taos is not what is known as a Part 139 airport, an FAA designation for major commercial hubs that sets stringent requirements on everything from perimeter fence height to emergency response capabilities. Non-Part 139 airports are the bread and butter of JSX. It is not always an easy fit. Because of the different security standards at non-Part 139 airports—including their not having TSA checkpoints—those Taos passengers cannot easily catch a transfer at Denver International; they have to take an Uber 30 minutes from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan. And even if JSX chose to fly into DIA, passengers would arrive at a separate facility outside of the TSA-secured commercial terminal and need to clear security before continuing on.
For Wilcox, non-Part 139 airports are an underutilized resource. “The entire competitive set for the major airline industry is 480 airports,” he says—despite there being more than 5,000 public airports in the country. Most of those other airports, he notes, “are not available on a retail basis, which we see as an opportunity.”
To understand the narrow regulatory window that makes JSX possible, it’s helpful to be heavily caffeinated—the better to navigate all the rules and jargon. First of all, traditional commercial aviation falls under a section of FAA code that mandates a minimum amount of pilot flight experience and a pilot retirement age of 65. But a whole other segment of code denotes charter flights with a maximum of 30 seats and comes with a different set of rules (fewer flight hours of experience, no retirement age). JSX follows those guidelines.
To allow customers to book flights, JSX takes advantage of yet another piece of regulation that establishes it as a so-called public charter company. The provision, known as Part 380, “serves a really important purpose in the industry,” explains Kali Hague, a partner at Jetlaw, a Washington, D.C., aviation law firm, “because it allows [charter] operators to provide transportation to small communities at an affordable price.” Those operators include the likes of Tropic Ocean Airways, which runs sea-planes in the Bahamas.
JSX does some fancy maneuvering here. A block of small lettering at the bottom of its homepage explains that “flights are operated ... by Delux Public Charter LLC (dba JSX Air).” The flights, it goes on, “are public charters sold by JetSuiteX Inc. as the charter operator and Delux Public Charter LLC as the direct air carrier.” In essence, JSX is two companies with the same ownership: one that sells the tickets and the other that flies the flights that have been chartered, mostly from obscure airports near its affluent target markets.
For most of its life, JSX has flown largely under the radar. That changed in 2023 with a Notice of Intent issued by the FAA. “In recent years scheduled public charter flights operating under Part 380 have expanded in frequency and complexity,” the agency noted. “This rapid growth poses an increased risk to safety if left unchecked.” (The Trump administration has made clear its intent to roll back regulations on industries including air travel, but whether that would reverse the FAA’s line of thinking ...
“Excuse me for one second,” says Alex Wilcox, co-founder and CEO of the air carrier JSX, as we sit in a conference room in the company’s headquarters at Dallas’s Love Field, overlooking a spacious hangar filled with a handful of Embraer jets. He dials up the Burbank station manager. “Hey, Arya, you at the station?” he asks. An affirmative crackles from the phone. “Larry David apparently went to the wrong airport—can you hold until 8:05, 8:10? Don’t hold more than 8:15.” Ending the call, Wilcox smiles, a look of mild exasperation on his face that signals he’s experienced high-maintenance clients more than a few times in his business.
The moment almost perfectly encapsulates JSX, the public charter air service founded by Wilcox in California in 2015 and sitting somewhere in the regulatory muddle between private-jet travel and commercial flight. JSX has steadily added routes and gained enthusiastic customers and accolades in recent years. While hardly a household name, it’s been voted Travel+Leisure’s number-one domestic airline—thanks to an experience that hints at the private-jet lifestyle at a fraction of the price (but typically several times the cost of an equivalent economy seat on a traditional commercial airliner). JSX employs about 1,000 people, and flew some 36,000 flights in 2024. While the company does not disclose revenue, estimates put it comfortably in the nine figures.
JSX is expanding its reach at a time when air travel, with all its delays and high costs and strict security regimens, is filled with potential for the kind of social awkwardness that kept Curb ticking along for 12 seasons. (In one episode, David, forced to fly coach because of a missed flight, reluctantly swaps his aisle seat for a middle and then is subjected to a litany of personal-space invasions from his seatmates.)
JSX does things differently. For one, there are no boarding groups, and no TSA lines—no TSA at all. Domestic-flight customers show up 20 minutes before their departure times, sink into spacious seats with plenty of elbow room, and order from well-curated cocktail menus while using fast and stable Starlink Wi-Fi. There are no middle seats.
The routes are different too. JSX flies mostly out of FBOs (fixed-base operators), aviation lingo for the general aviation areas of airports that are home to corporate jets and flight schools. It tends to eschew the big airports like JFK and Denver International for more obscure facilities like New York’s Westchester County and Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Metropolitan. Small wonder David accidentally headed to the wrong place. Rather than bicoastal redeyes, JSX routes tend to be short and targeted (Burbank to Las Vegas, for instance).
While the JSX moniker derives from a progenitor company called JetSuiteX, these days the branding revolves around the phrase “joyfully simple Xperience.” And that, says Wilcox, is something sorely missing from much of air travel. “Just this notion that we have to have such a huge edifice between your car and the airplane,” he says. “Why do we make airports so complicated?” A trained pilot and lifelong aviation enthusiast, Wilcox speaks with the anguish of a spurned romantic. “Somehow the average speed of traveling by air has gone down every single decade,” he says. “Everything’s getting slower, everything’s getting harder, which is the opposite of what the future was supposed to be. That’s what we’re trying to fight to bring back.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/lg6LuT89W1741263126921.jpg]
JSX FLIGHTS FIT NO MORE THAN 30 PEOPLE AND APPROXIMATE THE PRIVATE-JET EXPERIENCE AT A FRACTION OF THE PRICE.
Of course, the flip side of all those stringent regulations is that, prior to the recent crash in D.C., commercial air travel was the safest it had been in more than a decade; in 2023, there was one serious incident for every 1.26 million flights. Wilcox, however, argues that some measures have outlived their relevance. “No one really cares that the security fence is eight feet tall or 10 feet tall,” he says. “That doesn’t make a difference to anybody except for maybe a bad guy who can’t afford a bigger ladder.”
With JSX, he has found a way, embedded in the regulations, of bringing aspects of private-jet travel—subject to less onerous rules than commercial aviation—to a larger public. In this, he fancies himself a populist of sorts, fighting not only government red tape but also entrenched companies like American and Southwest Airlines. He waves around a well-thumbed copy of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen’s iconic book. “My takeaway is that if you get to a certain size, you become the people you disrupted,” he says, adding, for good measure, a paraphrase from the Batman movie The Dark Knight: “If you don’t die a hero, you live long enough to become the villain.” Few would argue with his diagnosis that commercial air travel has become a slog. But it's another question altogether whether his remedy is righteously or cynically opportunistic.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/xSLfBZgZl1741263181598.jpg]
As former TSA administrator John Pistole announced to the whole industry in a Travel Weekly op-ed, “It appears JSX may be exploiting the government's security regulatory procedures by implementing a business plan for which the policymakers at the FAA and TSA didn't plan.”
JetBlue founder David Neeleman, a JSX investor and one of the most admired innovators in the airline industry's recent history, calls that line of criticism “totally maddening.” And he marvels at Wilcox's chops as an operator. “It's remarkable really, when you think about all the airlines that lose money and all the ones that go out of business, that he has been able to make it not only survive but thrive.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/4172174729.jpg]
In Dallas, Wilcox gets a text. Larry David made the flight. All is well, for the moment. But JSX, a plucky upstart in a notoriously volatile industry, whose business model is based on navigating a very specific set of regulatory parameters, may be facing a more turbulent future.
Hang around airports and airplanes long enough and you'll notice that people don't usually just happen into the industry. Aviation attracts enthusiasts and dreamers. “The failure rate is pretty high, and the challenges are non-stop,” Wilcox says. “If you’re just a mercenary CEO, this isn’t the industry for you.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/7114441171.jpg]
Growing up in New York City with an American father and a Swiss mother, Wilcox flew overseas regularly to visit grandparents in his formative years. “The colors we chose for JSX are not dissimilar to Swiss Air’s,” he notes. He got his pilot’s license at age 17 and fueled airplanes in Burlington, Vermont, while studying English and political science at the University of Vermont. During an unpaid internship in the early '90s with Southwest Airlines, he met Herb Kelleher, the company’s legendary co-founder. Later he worked at Virgin Atlantic under Richard Branson, where he met Neeleman, who would go on to launch JetBlue in 1998 and hire Wilcox as its first full-time employee. “I got exposure to three people who’d actually done the impossible and started airlines,” he says.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1363631886/1741170363/articles/k-D46bmzL1741260420640/7277717741.jpg]
RIGHT FROM TOP: JETBLUE FOUNDER AND JSX INVESTOR DAVID NEELEMAN, VIRGIN ATLANTIC FOUNDER RICHARD BRANSON, AND SOUTHWEST CO-FOUNDER HERB KELLEHER, ALL OF WHOM WILCOX WORKED FOR ON HIS WAY TO STARTING JSX.
After helping launch Kingfisher, a groundbreaking and embattled low-cost Indian carrier, Wilcox found himself back in the States, drafting a business plan for a prospective private-jet charter company based in Las Vegas. That eventually led to his helming a company called JetSuite—until the market plummeted in the pandemic. The experience soured him on the private-aviation industry, which he describes with characteristic bluntness as “an awful, awful business.” The field is littered, he says, “with rampant examples of companies starting to scale and then running out of cash.” What galled him the most was the inefficiency. “Close to half of the private-jet flights that fly on any given day are empty,” he says. “They’re dropping someone off at point A and then going to pick somebody up at point B.”
But he was struck by another curious aspect of private-aviation economics. He’d watch people pay several thousand dollars to fly for 45 minutes when Southwest would do it for $200, and he couldn’t help asking why it was worth the money. “I don’t want to take off my shoes,” he’d hear. “I don’t want to wait for 160 other people to get on and off the airplane. I don’t want to spend an hour and a half at an airport.”
And so JetSuiteX was born, with the goal of producing a private-jet experience at a more commercial price point. It launched in 2016 with just two routes: Concord, California, to Burbank; and Burbank to Las Vegas.
Today JSX flies 46 planes between 25 markets. The process the company uses to pick routes is, Wilcox says, “very manual.” JSX tends to follow the money—for instance, flying between New York’s Westchester County and Boca Raton, Florida. “I couldn’t care less what my market share is,” Wilcox says. “All I care about is whether I can profitably fill my airplane.”
Another market niche for JSX is routes not served by the majors: Taos, New Mexico, for example, where an airline run by the Taos Ski Valley resort folded last year, leaving the town without an air link to Denver. Taos is not what is known as a Part 139 airport, an FAA designation for major commercial hubs that sets stringent requirements on everything from perimeter fence height to emergency response capabilities. Non-Part 139 airports are the bread and butter of JSX. It is not always an easy fit. Because of the different security standards at non-Part 139 airports—including their not having TSA checkpoints—those Taos passengers cannot easily catch a transfer at Denver International; they have to take an Uber 30 minutes from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan. And even if JSX chose to fly into DIA, passengers would arrive at a separate facility outside of the TSA-secured commercial terminal and need to clear security before continuing on.
For Wilcox, non-Part 139 airports are an underutilized resource. “The entire competitive set for the major airline industry is 480 airports,” he says—despite there being more than 5,000 public airports in the country. Most of those other airports, he notes, “are not available on a retail basis, which we see as an opportunity.”
To understand the narrow regulatory window that makes JSX possible, it’s helpful to be heavily caffeinated—the better to navigate all the rules and jargon. First of all, traditional commercial aviation falls under a section of FAA code that mandates a minimum amount of pilot flight experience and a pilot retirement age of 65. But a whole other segment of code denotes charter flights with a maximum of 30 seats and comes with a different set of rules (fewer flight hours of experience, no retirement age). JSX follows those guidelines.
To allow customers to book flights, JSX takes advantage of yet another piece of regulation that establishes it as a so-called public charter company. The provision, known as Part 380, “serves a really important purpose in the industry,” explains Kali Hague, a partner at Jetlaw, a Washington, D.C., aviation law firm, “because it allows [charter] operators to provide transportation to small communities at an affordable price.” Those operators include the likes of Tropic Ocean Airways, which runs sea-planes in the Bahamas.
JSX does some fancy maneuvering here. A block of small lettering at the bottom of its homepage explains that “flights are operated ... by Delux Public Charter LLC (dba JSX Air).” The flights, it goes on, “are public charters sold by JetSuiteX Inc. as the charter operator and Delux Public Charter LLC as the direct air carrier.” In essence, JSX is two companies with the same ownership: one that sells the tickets and the other that flies the flights that have been chartered, mostly from obscure airports near its affluent target markets.
For most of its life, JSX has flown largely under the radar. That changed in 2023 with a Notice of Intent issued by the FAA. “In recent years scheduled public charter flights operating under Part 380 have expanded in frequency and complexity,” the agency noted. “This rapid growth poses an increased risk to safety if left unchecked.” (The Trump administration has made clear its intent to roll back regulations on industries including air travel, but whether that would reverse the FAA’s line of thinking ...
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Inc. (Digital) - 1 Issue, Spring 2025