New Flight Department Research

[Iceman21]

I have been at my current company for nearly 2 years now (outside aviation job), and over those 2 years I have taken notice how much travel there is done. All the travel is done by airline. I have decided to start some research into acquiring an aircraft and starting a flight department at our company.

I am looking for some advice from those of you on the board that have experience in this area.

I know that I need to do a bunch of information gathering such as, number of travelers designated to utilize the aircraft (Senior MGMT, Middle MGMT, etc.), frequented destinations, airports in vicinity of those destinations, annual travel budget for the past few years. I will also look into our corporate culture to see if this is something the company might be interested in, but given the amount of travel that is done on a fairly regular basis, it seems from my outside perspective, that this exercise of research is on that should be done.

So please shoot me any experiences or any advice that will help in this process.

 

[gear_guy]

www.nbaa.org is a good place to start.

There is also some great software out there specifically designed for corporate flight operations. It will help you organize all the info (pax demand, cost of corp a/c travel vs. airline) and then create graphs that you can present to the right people. I have personally used it to justify keeping our dept. I can't remember the name of the software, but someone smarter than me will surely reply with the name of it. Good luck!

 

[PMVULB AvMgr]

Travel$ense

 

[Rick1128]

Ice,

One thing you need to explore is where exactly are these people traveling to. If they are traveling to and from major hub cities, you may find it difficult to justify a corporate aircraft. However, like most companies, the people traveling are traveling to smaller cities then renting cars to travel to even smaller cities, then you have a chance. Be sure to include intangibles like decreased overnights and employee morale.

 

[gear_guy]

Travel$ense

That's it!!!

 

[onthebeach]

Don't discount travel to hub cities

Corporate aircraft can be just as valuable & time saving when traveling to hub cities, maybe more so.

Take Chicago for example, there are what, 11 or so airports around the city that can take corporate aircraft? And many of them closer to various end destinations that MDW or ORD. A

Also, consider that the pax don't have to spend the time getting into and out of commercial airliners at said hubs.

In short, you can make a compelling case for corporate airplane travel to/from hub cities as well as to non-hubs.