In 2020, when the owners of Executive Fliteways (EFI) began shopping the charter/management firm, James Prinzivalli grew apprehensive. “I loved this place,” the former dispatcher and charter sales director said of the operator where he’d started his career 25 years before. “The owners were getting a lot of interest from heavy operators, and negotiations started getting serious.”
The prospective buyer, a “very large” company with its own dispatch and operations departments, “had no real use for the employees working here,” Prinzivalli said. “That rattled me. It got me thinking about trying to buy the company myself.”
Notwithstanding Covid had cratered charter demand and that no other employees of the New York Islip-MacArthur Airport-based service, founded in 1980, were interested in taking a stake, “I decided to risk it,” he recounted. “I put my entire life savings on the line” and bought the company….
