GetJet Airlines

Some airlines you see every day without knowing they’re there. GetJet Airlines from Lithuania falls right into this category: its aircraft take off under other airlines’ flight numbers, wear sometimes their own colors, sometimes a customer’s titles, and suddenly show up in Amsterdam, Barcelona or Helsinki. If you look closely, you’ll spot an LY registration on the fuselage – and with it one of the more exciting sightings in European summer traffic. This page shows you how GetJet works, which aircraft belong to it and how to assign them reliably.

GetJet Airlines at a glance

GetJet Airlines is a Lithuanian ACMI and charter airline based in Vilnius. It was founded in 2016 by Aleksandr Celiadin, who still chairs the board today. The first flight took off on May 25, 2016, in Vilnius – back then with a single Boeing 737-400. Today the airline belongs to the GetJet Group, headquartered in Vilnius.

The business model sets GetJet clearly apart from classic airlines like Eurowings or a low-cost carrier like Wizz Air. GetJet hardly sells any tickets of its own to passengers. Instead, the airline leases complete aircraft with crew to other airlines and flies charter series for tour operators, mainly from the Baltics. That puts it alongside other Baltic specialists such as Avion Express, Heston Airlines or the now-defunct SmartLynx Airlines from Latvia.

By its own account GetJet is IOSA registered, meaning it has passed the IATA safety audit – since February 7, 2018. Added to that are approvals for flights to Canada, the United Kingdom and the USA. For an ACMI airline, such approvals matter: the more markets it may serve, the more customers it can address.

Codes and callsign

• ICAO code GJT: appears in the air traffic control flight plan and on flight trackers when GetJet flies under its own callsign.
• Callsign GETJET: how the crew identifies itself on the radio.
• IATA code GW: on file for GetJet but rarely seen in everyday spotting.

The most important point for spotters: on wet-lease flights, the departures board almost always shows the customer airline’s flight number. Whether the tracker then shows the customer’s code or GJT depends on how the flight is filed. So never rely on the flight number alone, but check the registration. How to read tracker data correctly is explained in the guide to flight tracking for spotters.

Wet lease, ACMI and charter: how GetJet makes money

The abbreviation ACMI stands for Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance and Insurance. An airline that buys from GetJet therefore gets a complete package: the aircraft, the pilots and flight attendants, the maintenance and the insurance. The customer airline takes care of sales, ticket prices and flight numbers. For passengers this often looks like a completely normal flight of the airline they booked – only the aircraft and crew are different. The basics are explained in the article Wet lease explained, and the difference from pure leasing without crew in the post Aircraft leasing explained.

GetJet offers wet lease on a short-term and long-term basis. Short-term assignments step in, for example, when an airline’s aircraft are out of service or engines are in the shop. Long-term contracts usually cover an entire summer season. According to reports, partners have included Eurowings, Wizz Air, TUI Airways, Finnair, Icelandair, Transavia, Vueling and Etihad Airways, among others. Which contracts are currently running changes from season to season.

In addition, GetJet flies classic charter flights, mainly for tour operators from the Baltics. In 2018 the airline took over charter flights from Vilnius that had previously been operated by the Lithuanian Small Planet Airlines. How charter and scheduled traffic differ is shown in the article Charter vs. scheduled flights.

History: from the 737-400 to the A320

GetJet’s development can be read well from its fleet. According to the company chronicle it went like this:

Year	Event
2016	Founded in Vilnius, first flight on May 25 with a Boeing 737-400
2017	Expansion to several Boeing 737-400s and 737-300s
2018	Added to the IOSA registry on February 7; takeover of charter flights from Vilnius
2019	First Airbus A330 – GetJet becomes the first Baltic airline to fly long-haul with a widebody aircraft
2020	Named a leading company in the Lithuanian transport and logistics sector by the newspaper “Verslo žinios”
2022	First commercial flight of a Lithuanian airline to Australia
2023	Administration moves to the Business Garden office complex in Vilnius

The early years belonged to the older Boeing generations. The Boeing 737-300 and the Boeing 737-400 were cheap to get back then and common at charter airlines. These types no longer play a role at GetJet – so if you have a photo of a GetJet 737 Classic, you own a historic subject.

Remarkable is the excursion into long-haul. From fall 2019 GetJet flew an Airbus A330, according to reports, for LOT Polish Airlines between Warsaw and Toronto. In the same year a cooperation with the Canadian Sunwing Airlines was also reported. No A330 appears on the current fleet list on the GetJet website – so the widebody chapter is, at least for now, history.

The fleet: Airbus and Boeing mixed

Many ACMI airlines rely on a single type family. GetJet takes a different route and offers both big narrowbody families. There is a business reason: an Airbus airline like Vueling prefers an A320, a Boeing airline prefers a 737 – that way the customer’s procedures and ground equipment fit better. According to the GetJet website the fleet looks like this in 2026:

Type	Number	Spotter note
Airbus A320	11	Workhorse of the fleet
Airbus A321	1	One-off – for collectors the rarest GetJet subject
Boeing 737-800	5	737 Next Generation, popular with Boeing customers

You should treat the numbers as a snapshot. At ACMI airlines, aircraft often join at short notice or go back to lessors. Other sources give slightly different values for 2026, such as one more A320. So check current fleet data before a targeted hunt. The manufacturers are Airbus and Boeing.

For identification at the spot, comparing the families helps: you tell an A320 from an A321 by fuselage length and the number of emergency exits over the wing. The details are in the guide Telling the A318, A319, A320 and A321 apart. For the 737, the article Telling Boeing 737 Original, Classic, NG and MAX apart shows how to separate a 737-800 from older Classic models – handy when you sort old GetJet photos.

How to recognize GetJet

The livery is not a reliable feature at GetJet. Depending on the contract, the jets fly in their own colors, with titles of the customer airline or in a largely neutral look. Some customers demand their brand on the aircraft, others don’t. In addition, aircraft are reconfigured between contracts. Your sure anchors are therefore:

1. The registration: Lithuanian aircraft carry the prefix LY-. If you see an A320 with LY- in the color scheme of a Western European airline, an ACMI assignment is very likely.
2. The ICAO code on the tracker: GJT or the callsign “GETJET” confirms the operator. How to find an aircraft specifically by its registration is explained in the guide Tracking an aircraft by registration.
3. The season: Many GetJet assignments for Western European customers concentrate on the summer.

Spotting GetJet: where and when

Vilnius is GetJet’s home. At Vilnius Airport you see the jets in charter traffic with Baltic tour operators and between two contracts, when they come back for maintenance. According to its own announcements, the GetJet Group is also expanding maintenance capacity at Vilnius Airport – another reason why LY aircraft can be seen there again and again.

Outside Lithuania the contract schedule determines where GetJet shows up. On its own website the airline names operating bases such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Malta, Marseille, Keflavík, London Gatwick, Belgrade, Baku, Tunis, Casablanca and Montreal. That is a snapshot – the list changes as soon as new contracts start. In Germany there is no fixed GetJet schedule. The chance rises when an airline with many routes in Germany is currently buying in capacity.

Because GetJet assignments are hard to predict, an automatic notification is worthwhile. How to set up alerts for registrations, types and airlines in common trackers is shown in the guide Setting up notifications. And how rare your sighting is compared with a standard Ryanair, you can judge with the article Estimating the rarity of a sighting.

GetJet in the Baltic ACMI market

Lithuania is one of the centers of the European ACMI business. Besides GetJet, Avion Express and Heston Airlines are also based there, other providers that lease aircraft with crew to airlines across Europe. A generation earlier the national airline flyLAL shaped air traffic in Vilnius until it gave up in 2009. The change shows at the airport: instead of one big home airline, there are now many aircraft that are mostly in service elsewhere.

For spotters, that is exactly the appeal. The fleets of the Baltic ACMI airlines are manageable, and some jets wear different customer liveries over the years – how to recognize mixed and transitional liveries is shown in the guide Recognizing hybrid liveries. If you follow an LY registration over several seasons, you can collect several looks of the same aircraft.

Common mix-ups

• Equating the flight number with the operator – on wet lease the flight number belongs to the customer, the aircraft to GetJet.
• Taking every LY registration for GetJet – Avion Express and Heston Airlines also fly with Lithuanian registrations.
• Logging a customer livery as a customer aircraft – an A320 in someone else’s colors can still be a GetJet jet.
• Taking GetJet for a low-cost airline – GetJet mainly sells capacity to airlines and tour operators, not tickets to passengers.
• Looking for the A330 in the current fleet – the widebody no longer appears in today’s fleet list.

Conclusion

GetJet Airlines is an airline you tend to discover by chance. Since 2016 the operation out of Vilnius has developed from a few old Boeing 737s into a mixed fleet of Airbus A320s, one A321 and Boeing 737-800s that flies for other airlines summer after summer. If you note the registration and ICAO code on every sighting, you’ll recognize GetJet even when flight number and livery point to a completely different airline.