Private aviation · Van Nuys

The runway at Van Nuys is one of the busiest reliever fields in the country, and that traffic shapes everything about how a charter out of KVNY actually runs. The single 8,000-foot runway, 16R/34L, handles a steady flow of midsize and heavy aircraft, which means slot timing and ground coordination matter more here than at fields where you can simply taxi out when ready. A crew that knows the field plans the departure around the morning push, not against it.

Most operations stage out of the west-side FBOs along Waterman, where customs clears international arrivals on prior arrangement and the ramp handles everything from a Phenom to a Global. The local curfew is the detail that catches charter clients off guard. Van Nuys enforces a voluntary nighttime limit and a hard restriction on older, louder airframes between 10pm and 7am, so a Gulfstream repositioning empty after a late East Coast pickup needs to clear the noise budget before the tail number is even confirmed. We hold quiet aircraft for late legs and position them the day before when the schedule is tight, rather than promising a slot the field will not grant.

Positioning is the quiet cost nobody quotes upfront. An aircraft based in Scottsdale or Las Vegas flies in empty to meet a Van Nuys departure, and that ferry leg is real money whether it appears on your quote or not. We price it plainly, match the airframe to the trip rather than the trip to whatever happens to be on the ramp, and tell you when a short repositioning hop to Burbank or a Saturday morning slot would save more than it costs. The honest answer is sometimes that a different field serves the mission better, and we would rather say so than sell you a departure that fights the curfew, the customs window, or the morning traffic the whole way out.