The corporate jet - toy or necessity?

[integrale]

I believe the focus of the article was personal travel, not business travel, which is why corporations have a flight department to begin with.

 

[bigD]

Shaddup! I'm too busy trying to justify my existence to really bother to read the article!

 

[Gulfstream 200]

Yeah!! -- eat $hit!! since when is it illegal to side-track a thread here!!!


.

 

[gern_blanston]

Integrale, a lot of corporate flight departments start out as an excuse for personal travel. The time equation remains the same: If you're running a small billion-dollar-a-year company, your time's worth a lot to both you and your company shareholders, so it may make economic sense to get to Monterey for the car show as a one-day trip in the corporate jet as opposed to a 3-day airline ordeal.

 

[AlfaCharlie]

I could point out how our Falcon is occupied 90% of the time by middle managers and blue collar workers going to and from our processing plants. I could explain that the airplane almost never sees a personal trip. I could also state that our CEO has never taken a vacation in over 20 years. But it is pointless to argue with the liberal media, who's sole purpose is too often to drum up anti-business sentiment. Maybe we should complanin that the CEO's get paid too much while our country's newspaper reporters are unfairly going without.

 

[AcroChik]

I was enjoying this thread until...

..., It was decided that reporting information that actually appears in documents filed by corporations with the Securities and Exchange Commission (obviously a hotbed of commie simps), is part of the liberal conspiracy to upend America's global economic hegemony.

That USA Today rag is obviously in the hands of lefty evil doers determined to sully the purity of our precious bodily fluids. Aren't these the same deviated preverts who foisted floridation on us unsuspecting loyal Americans?

Now I'm really enjoying it.

Thanks for the chuckle

 

[AlfaCharlie]

I am afraid your opinion cannot be granted any credit, due to the inaccurracy in your StarWars quote.

 

[AcroChik]

I did it from memory.

Is it wrong? What's the right one?

 

[sleepy]

We provide very little personal travel. It is almost all business, and it would be impossible to run our business if our executives had to travel on the airlines to get to all of our 2000 stores. We typically hit three cities a day, with the executives walking through 10 or more stores in each city. It just cannot be accomplished on any airline in a timely manner.

As for the relative safety of the airlines, every one of them has at least one fatal crash, we have never had an accident or incident in the history of our flight department. Not to mention the fact that our security personnel would not be able to carry their weapons onto the airlines. That is not a problem on our own aircraft (I would bet that almost every CEO of a major corporation gets some kind of threat from some nut.) It is a real threat.

The quality of maintenance is higher on our aircraft that on any airline aircraft I ever flew. The quality of training and personel and is better throughout our flight department than was my experience at two airlines.

If you look at the implications of the loss of a key executive to the future of a large corporation, it just is not worth the risk for them to fly on the airlines.

 

[AlfaCharlie]

Bolen says it best

What USA Today Didn't Say About Business Aircraft Use

A statement from Ed Bolen, president and CEO, National Business Aviation Association

It seems that every year or so, a journalist recycles a story about the annual filings of publicly traded companies to write a condemning account of corporate officials' use of company aircraft. So it was with a recent USA Today story focusing on use of company planes for personal executive travel (“The corporate jet: Necessity or ultimate executive toy?” 4/26/05).

Unfortunately, this sensationalist approach conveys the impression that business aviation is simply a perk of the corporate elite, when the facts document a very different, American entrepreneurial story.

About 15,000 business aircraft are registered in the United States, only 3 percent of which are flown by Fortune 500 companies. The vast majority, 97 percent, are flown by a diverse group of operators in every state – government, schools and universities, farms, foundations and other charitable organizations, religious institutions and an array of small and medium-size businesses.

Passenger surveys indicate that the majority of business aviation flyers, 86 percent, are not top management, but mid-level, professional or technical staff heading to a remote location or making more efficient use of business time.

Surveys also show that business aviation passengers who make decisions about whether or not to use company aircraft are cost sensitive; their use drops by half if the cost of that business flight increases by $300 per takeoff and landing.

And, contrary to claims made in USA Today, studies have shown that companies operating business aircraft earn over 140 percent more in cumulative shareholder returns than companies without business aircraft.

So what about the minority of corporate executives whose compensation includes personal travel privileges on company planes, which USA Today chose to focus on instead of the more than 10,000 American companies using business aircraft?

There are many reasons why an executive might use aircraft for purposes other than business travel. Some company directors require top executives to use company planes for all their travel based on the outstanding safety and security of business aviation. In a post-9/11 world, security for many companies has become a higher priority, and a company plane features pilots, crew and passengers who all know each other, in contrast to the passenger airlines. Other company directors cite the importance of making the best use of their top executives' time, and prefer the greater efficiency of a company plane to commercial aviation. In some instances, top executives have negotiated personal use of company planes as part of their compensation packages.