Stephanie Chung spent more than thirty years in aviation — parking planes at Boston Logan as a teenager, selling corporate accounts for US Airways at 25, generating $835 million in revenue at Flexjet, becoming the first African American president of a private aviation company and more.
Today's Builders · The Black Executive Journal™ Dallas, Texas · Private Aviation · JetSuite · Wheels Up · XTI Aerospace
— Born on an Air Force base to a father who was a Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force; raised as a military child, moving every two years across Air Force installations — an upbringing she credits directly with shaping her discipline, adaptability, and comfort operating in environments where she was always the newcomer
— Began her aviation career in the 1980s as a ground handler with Piedmont Airlines at Boston Logan International Airport — marshalling aircraft, loading luggage, and performing weight and balance calculations; worked the ticket counter for additional income; upon US Airways' acquisition of Piedmont, transitioned into corporate sales at age 25 with a $25 million quota
— Recruited by Bombardier Aerospace in 2000 as a sales director in its air charter division; rose to Vice President of Sales for Bombardier's U.S. West Coast region; later held executive roles at SkyJet Airlines and Delta Air Lines
— As Vice President of Sales at Flexjet, led the strategic deal and sales organization team to generate $835 million in revenue
— Founded a consulting practice in 2014 focused on executive-level sales training; was recruited by airline executive Alex Wilcox to serve as President of JetSuite in August 2018 — becoming the first African American, and the second woman, to serve as president of a major private aviation company in the United States
— As JetSuite president, repositioned the brand from a commodity service to a luxury customer experience by upgrading the fleet, elevating service standards, and reinvesting in the employee base; under her leadership JetSuite was named to the Dallas Business Journal's 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies and voted one of the Best Places to Work by the Human Rights Campaign; JetSuite filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2020
— Named inaugural Chief Growth Officer of Wheels Up in August 2020 — the first person to hold the role at one of the world's largest private aviation brands; tasked with diversifying the membership base by targeting corporations, associations, entrepreneurs, and sports and entertainment personalities; transitioned to Global Brand Ambassador role at Wheels Up in 2022
— Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008; survived and returned to full executive capacity; led Wheels Up's 2020 Breast Cancer Awareness Month initiative, raising funds for the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai; has spoken publicly about the 40% higher breast cancer mortality rate for Black women compared to white women
— Named to Adweek's 2021 Women Trailblazers; named to Robb Report's "23 Black Visionaries Who Are Changing the Luxury World Right Now" in 2021; included in the Ebony Power 100; recognized in D CEO Magazine's Top 500
— Currently an in-demand keynote speaker on neuroscience leadership, neuroscience selling, and ally leadership; published author of Ally Leadership: How to Lead People Who Are Not Like You (2024); board member of XTI Aerospace; member of Business Executives for National Security (BENS); member of C200; serves on the National Business Aviation Association Advisory Council and the Make-A-Wish board
Stephanie Chung grew up around planes. Her father was a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Air Force, and the family moved every two years — from base to base, state to state, country to country.
Most military children experience that itinerant childhood as disruption.
Chung absorbed it as education.
She learned how to walk into a new room and operate effectively inside it without the advantage of existing relationships or institutional memory.
She learned how to read unfamiliar environments quickly. She learned how to project authority before she had earned it, because on a new base, in a new school, you either did that or you disappeared.
"I would hear planes literally taking off and landing my entire life, every day, throughout the day," she has said. "That's really where my love for aviation started to be planted."
The love was specific from the beginning.
She knew she didn't want to be a flight attendant. She didn't know women could be pilots — at least not in the circles she grew up in. She knew she wanted to be in aviation, and she knew she wanted to run things, not serve things.
That clarity, held through an entire childhood of constant relocation, is the first data point worth noting about Stephanie Chung.
The second is what she did when she graduated and needed a job: she went to Boston Logan Airport, talked her way into a ground handling position with Piedmont Airlines, and started loading luggage on the ramp.
The ramp job was not a stepping stone she treated as beneath her.
It was where she learned the physical infrastructure of the industry — how aircraft moved, how weight was distributed, how a departure operation actually functioned from the ground up.
She worked overtime at the ticket counter for extra money.
She learned customer operations from both ends: the one passengers see and the one they don't.
When US Airways acquired Piedmont, Chung was twenty-five years old. A sales executive at the airline noticed her at the ticket counter and suggested she consider a move into corporate sales. She took the advice.
Her first sales quota was $25 million.
She hit it.
What followed was a methodical, decades-long ascent through every major segment of the aviation industry. Commercial airlines. Charter. Fractional ownership. Private aviation.
At each stage she moved into sales leadership, built teams, and generated revenue at a scale that required institutional resources to match.
At Bombardier Aerospace, recruited in 2000 as a sales director in its air charter division, she rose to Vice President of Sales for the entire U.S. West Coast region.
At Flexjet, as Vice President of Sales, she led the strategic deal and sales organization team to $835 million in revenue.
These are not vanity metrics.
In private aviation, where margins are thin and the client base is defined by the highest levels of wealth and discretion, $835 million in Flexjet revenue represents an enormous volume of relationships built, maintained, and converted — at a price point where the sale is never transactional and the relationship is everything.
She was, throughout all of it, almost always the only Black person in the room. Often the only woman.
She has described going to industry conferences where no one else looked like her — not as a hardship to be overcome but as a condition she had decided in advance would not stop her. "My thought has always been, 'I'll just win you over,'" she has said. "You're going to meet me and you're going to love me."
In 2008, Chung was diagnosed with breast cancer.
She was in the middle of an economy that had collapsed and a job that required selling private jets to people who had stopped buying them. She had no family history of the disease.
Her oncologist called it a drive-by.
She went through treatment.
Her daughter — then in high school — became a caregiver almost overnight.
Chung has spoken about watching her daughter grow up in real time during that period, and about the particular clarity cancer gave her about what her priorities actually were versus what she had been allowing them to be. "Cancer doesn't just change you," she has said, "it changes your whole family."
She came through it. She came through it with a different relationship to work — more disciplined about boundaries, more precise about what she would and would not allow to consume her.
She has said it made her a better boss, a better wife, and a better mother.
It did not slow her career.
If anything, the period that followed produced her most consequential work.
In 2014, Chung left full-time corporate employment to found her own consulting practice — focused on executive-level sales training and coaching.
For four years she worked with aviation executives, refining a methodology around what she calls the neuroscience of selling: the brain science of how people make purchasing decisions, how trust is built, and how sales professionals can align their approach to the actual cognitive processes of their buyers.
That practice brought her into contact with Alex Wilcox, the airline executive building JetSuite.
Wilcox recruited her as President in August 2018.
JetSuite was approaching its tenth year. It had established itself in the private aviation market but had not fully differentiated at the luxury end of the category. Chung's mandate was to elevate.
She upgraded the fleet.
She overhauled service standards.
She reinvested in the employee base, understanding that in a service business operating at the level of private aviation, the product is inseparable from the people delivering it.
Under her leadership, JetSuite was voted one of the Best Places to Work by the Human Rights Campaign and named to the Dallas Business Journal's 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies.
She was, by her appointment, the first African American and the second woman ever to serve as president of a major private aviation company in the United States. NBC DFW ran a story with the headline: "First Black Private Jet President Flies Through Glass Ceiling."
Essence covered it.
CNBC put her on camera.
In April 2020, JetSuite filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection — a victim of the combination of COVID-19's near-total destruction of aviation demand and the structural vulnerabilities the pandemic exposed across the private aviation sector.
The company had been growing under Chung's leadership.
The bankruptcy was not a verdict on her performance.
It was a verdict on what a pandemic does to a business that depends entirely on people choosing to travel.
Four months after JetSuite's bankruptcy filing, Wheels Up — then one of the largest and fastest-growing private aviation brands in the United States, with 9,000+ members and a fleet of more than 300 owned and managed aircraft — named Chung as its first-ever Chief Growth Officer.
The mandate was specific: diversify the membership base.
Private aviation had historically been a narrow, demographically homogeneous market. Wheels Up's growth thesis required expanding it — reaching corporations, associations, entrepreneurs, and sports and entertainment personalities who were the next generation of private flyers but had not yet been systematically recruited.
Chung, with thirty years of aviation sales relationships and a track record of building teams that generated nine-figure revenue, was the person they hired to do it.
She also brought something harder to quantify: direct experience as the kind of customer Wheels Up wanted to attract.
As a Black woman executive in a field with almost no Black representation at the senior level, she understood the barriers — perceptual, cultural, and structural — that kept potential customers from engaging with private aviation brands.
She understood that the product itself was not the only thing being sold; that belonging mattered, that seeing people who looked like you in the marketing and leadership of a brand affected purchasing behavior, and that diversifying the customer base required first diversifying the brand's own presence.
She held the Chief Growth Officer role through 2021, transitioning to Global Brand Ambassador for Wheels Up in 2022 — a role focused on representing the brand externally across the aviation industry and with key audiences.
Chung's post-corporate chapter has not been a winding down. It has been a reconfiguration of the same capabilities into different forms.
She is now among the most in-demand keynote speakers in the business aviation and leadership space. Her signature presentations draw on the neuroscience of leadership and selling — translating brain science into practical frameworks for executives managing diverse, multigenerational teams.
She served as the opening keynote speaker at the NBAA Leadership Conference in 2025. She has spoken to the Women in Aviation International community and to audiences across the corporate sector.
In 2024 she published Ally Leadership: How to Lead People Who Are Not Like You — a book that addresses the practical challenge of leading diverse teams, structured around her Ask, Listen, Learn, Act model.
The book draws directly from her experience as a Black woman who spent thirty years leading predominantly white, predominantly male organizations in an industry that had almost no Black representation at the senior level.
She serves on the board of XTI Aerospace, bringing her aviation industry depth to a company developing hybrid-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — the next generation of private aviation infrastructure.
She is a member of Business Executives for National Security (BENS) and serves on the Make-A-Wish board.
Her daughter founded the nonprofit Elevation Society, focused on reducing youth suicide rates.
Private aviation is one of the most exclusionary industries in the American economy — by design, by history, and by the compounding effect of decades of homogeneous leadership.
Stephanie Chung spent thirty years changing that from the inside: first by showing up, then by producing revenue that made her impossible to dismiss, then by taking the president's chair and redefining who that person could be.
What she built in the process was not just a career.
It was a record — documented in departure logs, revenue figures, and a title nobody Black had ever held before — that the industry cannot un-write.
The following sources were fetched and read directly in the reporting of this profile. All factual claims are drawn from these documents.
Wikipedia — Stephanie Chung Primary biographical reference; career timeline, JetSuite presidency, Wheels Up appointment, Bombardier and Flexjet roles, cancer diagnosis, personal background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Chung
Essence — After Beating Cancer, Stephanie Chung Just Became The First Black President of A Private Jet Company (September 2018) Interview sourced directly; military upbringing, ramp job origin story, $25M quota at age 25, glass ceiling quotes, diversity pipeline intent, cancer account, self-care philosophy — all quotes drawn directly from this primary interview https://www.essence.com/news/money-career/women-lets-win/beating-cancer-stephanie-chung-first-black-president-jet-company/
Wheels Up / PR Newswire — Wheels Up Names Stephanie Chung as First Chief Growth Officer (August 17, 2020) CGO appointment confirmed; mandate confirmed; $835 million Flexjet revenue confirmed; JetSuite HRC Best Places to Work and Dallas Business Journal 100 Fastest Growing Companies confirmed; C200 membership, NBAA Advisory Council, Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Advisory Board confirmed; Chung quote sourced directly https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wheels-up-names-stephanie-chung-as-first-chief-growth-officer-301112974.html
AfroTech — Meet Stephanie Chung, the New Chief Growth Officer at Private Aviation Brand Wheels Up (October 2020) Ramp job detail confirmed; ticket counter origin of sales career confirmed; 40% higher breast cancer mortality rate for Black women quote sourced directly; Wheels Up Cares / Dubin Breast Center initiative confirmed https://afrotech.com/meet-stephanie-chung-the-new-chief-growth-officer-at-private-aviation-brand-wheels-up
Business Executives for National Security (BENS) — Episode 22: Stephanie Chung 2022 Wheels Up transition to Global Brand Ambassador confirmed; BENS membership confirmed; Make-A-Wish board confirmed; Adweek 2021 Women Trailblazers and Robb Report 2021 Black Visionaries confirmed; career narrative corroborated in full https://bens.org/episode-22-stephanie-chung/
Global Leadership Network — Ep 171: Stephanie Chung on Leading People Who Are Not Like You (2025) Ally Leadership book publication in 2024 confirmed; $1 billion annual revenue generation referenced; current keynote speaker status confirmed https://www.globalleadership.org/podcast/ep-171-stephanie-chung-on-leading-people-who-are-not-like-you
LinkedIn — Stephanie Chung / XTI Aerospace XTI Aerospace board membership confirmed; 2025 NBAA Leadership Conference keynote confirmed; current professional activity verified https://www.linkedin.com/in/thestephaniechung/
Today's Builders is a series by The Black Executive Journal profiling the founders, operators, investors, and executives shaping Black and African business right now — the dealmakers closing rounds, the operators building institutions, the strategists entering new markets and constructing lasting economic infrastructure across the diaspora economy in real time.
