Most Requested Aircraft Types & What the Requests Actually Represented
Throughout 2025, activity inside CrewBlast showed consistent operational patterns. Request volume correlated directly with utilization pressure, trip overlap, and how tightly operators were scheduling aircraft, not aircraft familiarity.
Below are the five most requested aircraft categories on CrewBlast in 2025, listed by volume, along with current contract pilot daily rates and what typically triggered the requests.
Typical Daily Rate: $3,000–$3,500**
What the requests typically meant
Almost all notifications came from trips that could not slide... international departures, multi-day owner travel, or back-to-back long-range rotations. These were rarely vacation coverage; they were schedule protection events where delay was not an option.
Most fills occurred when:
Typical Daily Rate: $2,500–$2,800**
What the requests typically meant
This category produced steady, predictable demand. Unlike the GVI, these were less emergency driven and more utilization driven. Operators frequently used contract crew to keep aircraft moving rather than parking them for crew legality or rest.
Common triggers:
In many cases the contract pilot wasn’t replacing someone — they were enabling an additional trip.
Typical Daily Rate: $1,800–$2,000**
What the requests typically meant
This was the highest frequency, lowest lead-time category. Requests often appeared same-day and were typically resolved quickly.
Typical triggers:
Speed of fill mattered more than anything else in this segment.
Typical Daily Rate: $2,250**
What the requests typically meant
Nearly all requests were dispatch-reliability related. These aircraft were scheduled tightly and losing a crew member meant losing the trip unless replaced immediately.
Common triggers:
Typical Daily Rate: $2,000–$2,250**
What the requests typically meant
This category produced repeat operators. Requests were rarely urgent emergencies, they were predictable staffing gaps tied to smaller typed pilot pools.
Common triggers:
Across all five aircraft categories, most requests fell into operational continuity rather than crisis response:
Primary use cases
The overall trend is consistent, contract flight crew are being used as an operational extension of staffing rather than a last-resort solution.