With stations in more than 30 countries, Prague-based Euro Jet provides flight support to business aviation, charter and military customers. ‘Charlie’ Bodnar, the company’s CEO, shares its story
From the moment Teams makes the connection for our interview, it is clear Karol ‘Charlie’ Bodnar, chief executive officer of Euro Jet, a flight support company headquartered in Prague and active across Europe and Asia, is always on the move. Sitting in a conference room with a colleague, he’s unhappy with the camera angle and immediately jumps up to adjust it before settling down with a smile, ready to talk.
A veteran of more than 20 years in the aviation industry, Bodnar’s enthusiasm for the sector and its people is abundantly evident. His route to Euro Jet, he explains, was somewhat unconventional. “I was a ramp worker with the Slovak Airport Authority, hoping for promotion to handling manager. One of the conditions for promotion was to have a degree from any college. I didn’t have one and my director suggested I apply to a college that I knew nothing about. It turned out to be the Military Aviation Academy in Kosice.”
Later, with an engineering degree under his belt, Bodnar was pleased to get a promotion but disappointed that it was not to handling manager. “It was only a small promotion, not what I was hoping for, and that’s how I ended up at Euro Jet. I left Slovakia and moved to Prague, where we started the company,” he explains.
For the many people who remember the Cold War and notions of East and West, the Czech Republic is an Eastern European country. In reality it is perhaps just a little east of Europe’s dead centre and therefore well positioned for Europe-wide access as well as spreading its influence out into Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Which begs the question of whether Bodnar and his colleagues recognised the strategic significance of its geographical position when they established Euro Jet in 2008.
He says: “We identified Prague as the best hub from which to establish and grow the business. Back then, we used Czech Airlines to travel to all our locations, and it was no more than a 90-minute flight to virtually anywhere we needed to go. For comparison, it’s a little like being in Houston, where East Coast and West Coast have pretty much the same flight time. For me, as a Slovak, there was also no language barrier.”
The Czech and Slovak Republics have a long, proud history in aviation manufacturing, airline activity and military operations. Bodnar says that legacy means there has always been a pool of aviation talent available as Euro Jet has grown. “There is an aviation academy in Prague, and we used to recruit from the Czech Airlines training academy too. We still have aircraft manufacturing here and an aircraft maintenance industry, while Prague airport has always been helpful and friendly towards us, helping us understand how other airports would react to our type of business.”
Geographical spread
Among the many locations it serves, Euro Jet has vendor partnerships throughout the world, including Africa. “Our major presence is in Europe,” says Bodnar, although he recognises Africa’s aviation potential. “Operating there is very complex and those seven locations you see identified on our website are those where we feel we can operate comfortably, using third-party service providers whose quality we can guarantee. I had plans to expand in Africa, but so far haven’t had the chance to do it, because there is so much to do elsewhere.
“Setting up a station in a new country for us means much more than having someone running around with a mobile phone. We’re analysing the country’s civil aviation rules, registering a local entity and hiring people, in a political environment where things often change and how we work today isn’t the way we need to work tomorrow. It’s challenging and time consuming, but the company is growing, and we’ve developed a team that takes care of our affiliates while I provide oversight.”
Prague was Euro Jets’ original location for its travel connections, and travel remains essential to how Bodnar chooses to do business. He says he travels most weeks, a fact reflecting both his work ethic and the wide geographical spread of the company’s people. Bodnar’s career progress from ramp agent to general manager and, later, CEO at Euro Jet means he has experienced many of the roles his staff fulfil. “I’ve done this from the ground up. I’ve no problem taking off my jacket and loading bags if that’s required, but after almost 20 years in the market I have a team of excellent people around me who can do these things and help me steer in the direction we need to go. I like to stay more deeply involved in finance, human resources and marketing though. I’m heavily involved in our talent search and love marketing. I still manage the detail when it’s needed but I don’t micromanage like I had to in the past. Still, I often compare myself to a circus plate spinner, but with fewer plates than in the past and it all works.”
Asked to identify the most rewarding Euro Jet moments, Bodnar immediately responds: “If we have a location that usually has 150 flights per month and then because of a special event it has substantially more, I can move people around between our stations to take care of this increased volume. If we can do that seemingly impossible thing, without complaints from our customer service team or their customers, it’s really rewarding. I look forward to that kind of challenge, making the impossible work.
“My business partner has always said that I’m never nervous when there is a challenge or problem because I know I can fix it. I’m nervous when things go well, because I don’t know what might happen next! So, I’m always ready to react and Euro Jet has always been adaptive to business and political change.”
As a result, the company manages to cover a huge geographical range, sometimes with only one or two people permanently at its least busy locations, although always with the possibility of back-up as required. Bodnar likes to be visible to his team, but that presents another challenge: how to reach them all.
“It has always been a challenge. I think Covid helped a little bit because we were disconnected and had to figure out how to communicate. We use several platforms to communicate at different levels, but I was inspired by Starbucks after it used a platform that allowed its staff to challenge one another on how to make the best coffee.
“I wanted to try it, and it works fantastically. It means an operations person can see an airplane land, share a video or photo of it internally, away from the public internet, so that our ops person sitting in an office hundreds of kilometres away can see the aircraft and speak to the guy on the ground. The system went viral internally as our staff started sharing things and thinking of new ways to use it. After Covid we built on it even more and it became a living creature that we call Ramp Life. We see so many good things through it and we even use it to collect customer feedback.”
And yet there is no replacement for sitting down with the boss and Bodnar says he still travels a great deal. “Our people want me to visit their country, to show me things they want to share and get decisions made. I love to travel and it’s good to see the faces. But even if I visited a different country every month, I couldn’t get around all our countries in a year, so we divide the visits between the executive team.”
Diversity
The diversity in Euro Jet’s team and locations is matched in its business, which supports specialist charter, corporate, military and business aviation. “We can’t base our business on only one type of aviation,” Bodnar explains. “The fact there is always some open conflict somewhere in the world makes it much more difficult to react to the market and continue growing a service business. It would not be smart to just wait at airports to see who arrives next. We must search for our next opportunity, and for that reason I think we have become very good at serving diverse markets. We work heavily with the airlines, for example, and the emergency readiness programme we developed for them is very successful and still growing.”
The challenges of the business aviation market are in part responsible for Euro Jet’s diversification. Nonetheless, Bodnar says: “These past couple of years I’ve seen many new young people becoming wealthy and looking at fractional ownership or buying an airplane. I think of them as ‘clickers’, because they just click and buy an airplane. It means there are new opportunities for Euro Jet and the wider industry, but there needs to be some education too, so we understand their expectations, and they understand the industry.
“Most business aviation passengers used to wear suits but now we see people in shorts and t-shirts travelling to see football games. We need to adjust to their needs, but the basic requirements of moving people from A to B, fuelling aircraft and meeting regulations are the same.
“I see a lot of possibility in our core region. The eastern parts of Europe still have a great deal of potential for development, with infrastructure expanding as new wealth is generated. All that means an expansion in business aviation.”
Does it also mean expansion for Euro Jet? “For me, that means where will we be on the company’s 20th anniversary,” Bodnar says. “Right now we are on year 17 and we’ve been growing on average around 5% year-on-year. To sustain that level of growth, you really need fantastic people around you and you need to search for talent, and focus on the customer, listening to and understanding what they have to say. I want to deliver services that customers want and that means adopting technology without losing the personal touch we’ve had from day one. So, we’re looking at AI tools and investing heavily in IT and platforms, but I still believe that business aviation persists through trust and personal relationships.”