Apollo Global Management announced on 27 August 2026 that funds it manages have acquired a significant, co-controlling interest in Atlantic Aviation, the largest fixed base operator network in the United States, in a transaction Bloomberg reported values the company at nearly $10 billion. KKR, which has owned Atlantic since 2021, is reinvesting and remains a substantial shareholder, and Bloomberg reported that Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC has joined as a co-investor.
Neither the announcement nor the trade coverage disclosed ownership percentages, a purchase price or a closing date, and the $10 billion figure is Bloomberg's reporting rather than a confirmed transaction value.
What makes this worth the attention of anyone who flies privately is not the private equity choreography but what the buyers are actually buying. Atlantic sells ramp space, fuel uplift and hangar leases at more than a hundred American airports, and that revenue line has just been marked at roughly twice what it was worth five years ago.
Half Again the Ramps, Twice the Price
Atlantic Aviation as KKR bought it in 2021, against the valuation Apollo has just bought into.
The number that moved
When Macquarie Infrastructure Corporation agreed to sell Atlantic Aviation to KKR in June 2021, the price was $4.475 billion in cash, assumed debt and reorganisation obligations, including roughly $1 billion of assumed debt. Corporate Jet Investor reported that the price implied 16.2 times Atlantic Aviation's 2019 earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Macquarie's disclosure put the network at 69 airport locations.
Atlantic Aviation today states "Over 105 locations in North America" on its own website.
So the footprint has grown by roughly half while the headline valuation has roughly doubled. The two figures are not perfectly comparable, since the 2021 number is an enterprise value that swept in debt and the 2026 number is a company valuation reported by a third party, but the direction is not in doubt. Divide each headline by the location count and the implied value per site moves from about $65 million to about $95 million. Buying more ramps explains part of that. Repricing the ramps explains the rest.
For scale, the other global chain, Signature Aviation, was taken private in 2021 for about $4.6 billion with a network then reported at around 350 locations worldwide. Atlantic now carries more than double that price on a footprint confined to North America.
What the buyers said they were buying
Apollo partner David Cohen put the thesis in a sentence. Atlantic, he said, "has built an irreplicable infrastructure footprint across the nation's busiest airports, underpinned by long-term concession agreements and a customer base that values reliability and service above all else."
Read that as underwriting rather than as a compliment. Irreplicable means a competitor cannot build a second Atlantic, because a busy airport has a finite number of leaseholds and those leaseholds are already spoken for. Long-term concession agreements mean the position is contracted years forward. And a customer base that values reliability above all else is a courteous way of saying the customer does not shop on price.
KKR partner Dash Lane described Atlantic as "the kind of scaled, essential infrastructure platform we seek to build in our portfolio." Apollo was advised by Paul, Weiss on legal matters, with Evercore and Morgan Stanley on finance. Kirkland and Ellis advised KKR.
Why the multiple holds
Anyone underwriting a valuation of this size is assuming the fee base keeps growing, and the traffic supports that. WingX data reported by Private Jet Card Comparisons has private jets flying about 3.5% more year to date in 2026 than in the same period of 2025, with North America and the United States each running around 3% ahead over the most recent four weeks. ARGUS TRAQPak recorded global business aviation activity up 3.6% year on year in April, led by a 3.5% gain in North America. AVNET covered the same pattern in the first half departures data, where fractional flying did much of the lifting.
Volume is only half of the equation. An FBO's revenue is a product of how many aircraft arrive and how much each one is charged once it does: ramp fee, facility fee, handling, overnight parking, hangar rate, and the margin on every gallon uplifted. The fuel margin is the quiet part. An operator can shop fuel, but at a single-FBO airport the operator is shopping at one counter. That is why the category has been re-rated. The scarce asset is not the terminal building. It is the concession that permits anyone to sell fuel and park aircraft on that ramp at all.
What it means for the invoice
Ground costs are the part of an ownership budget that tends not to get modelled. Fuel burn and maintenance reserves are forecast to the hour, while ramp and hangar simply get paid, invoice by invoice, and rarely appear as a line anyone negotiates. Our breakdown of the real annual cost of owning a private jet shows how quickly those charges compound across a flying year.
Nothing about this transaction raises a fee tomorrow. Ownership changed hands; the price list did not. But a buyer paying this multiple expects fees at the busiest American airfields to keep climbing, and expects competition not to stop them. Owners and charter buyers should look closely at what handling actually costs them at their two or three most-used fields.
It is also not an isolated repricing. SpaceX doubled Starlink Aviation pricing this summer, with the new rates biting from billing cycles on or after 7 August 2026, according to Corporate Jet Investor, and aircraft management is consolidating at the same time. Connectivity, management and ground infrastructure are three separate layers of the ownership cost stack, and all three moved in a single quarter.
What to watch
Whether Atlantic keeps acquiring. Apollo's language points at growth, the network has added more than thirty locations under KKR, and every additional site at a busy field removes an alternative. Watch too for pricing transparency, which the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has pressed for over years and which gets a louder argument at a $10 billion valuation.
No terms beyond the reported valuation are public. The direction of travel is. The ground beneath the aircraft is now among the most expensive assets in business aviation.