Goodbye Company Jets?

[Gerard]

After being ridiculed by an angry Congress and the media for using company jets to fly to DC to beg for money, one of the Big 3 automakers is already cutting back on the use of private jets. GM which had 7 jets now has "only" 5 though 2 had already been returned
in Sept. as part of a cost cutting plan.
It looks like this might be a trend for private companies in all the business sectors. Usually corporate flight departments are the first
areas to get sacked when money gets tight. I have already heard about a number of companys eliminating or downsizing their flight
departments which include both fixed wing and helicopters. They will now fly commercial like the rest of us peasants :lol:, cut down
drastically the use of the aircraft or charter instead of owning outright.
We shall see.

[lijk604]

Bristol Myers closed their flight department earlier this year, which is strange for a company in a sector that is doing well. Of course, I know all to well that Lehman Brothers had their flight department closed for them, they had no choice. However, there are some companies that used to charter, but now own jets and "cannot live" without them. The benefits of having a jet, for some companies, far out weigh the savings of having to go commercial. One of the factors you have to consider is does your company have a presence in a city far removed from airline service?
Say for example, (hypothetically) you are in NY and owned a paper product business, your main manufacturing plant is located in a small town called Thomaston, Georgia. You could never get up in the morning, go to the airport, fly commercial, rent a car, drive to your facility for a meeting and be back in the same day. Having your own jet, you can get up at a decent hour, leave NY at 8am, fly right into the small g/a airport in Thomaston, have your plant meeting, be back at the airport by 4pm, and be back in your car by 615pm, in time for a dinner meeting with a client in NY.

[Gerard]

>The benefits of having a jet, for some companies, far out weigh the savings of having to go commercial. One of the factors you have to consider is does your company have a presence in a city far removed from airline service? <

Also one of the great benefits of owning/chartering a helicopter. Into and out of Manhattan(where most Fortune 500 companies have offices) quickly and with the modern helicopters of today they have extended flight radius AND the ability to bypass airports and land at company helipads/helistops. Such an example is Cablevision who have a pad at their Bethpage and Woodbury facilitys and possibly up at the sports training facility in Greenburgh, NY (Westchester County).though I'm not positive as the locals were lobbying against it last I heard.
I dont fault any company for using corporate aircraft as long as it is for company business and not frivolity (that a word? LOL).
"Time is money" as they say and sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic is a big waste of that.

[dimamo1983]

I think Mac summed it up very good in the latest issue of AOPA eNewsletter so I am just going to cut and past instead of trying to say the same thing :)

Left Seat
By J. Mac McClellan
Business Airplanes Are Not Luxuries
Business aviation suffered another public relations fiasco last week when the top brass of Detroit's Big Three automakers each flew in corporate jets to Washington to ask Congress for a multibillion dollar taxpayer bailout. The most ardent supporter of business aviation can attempt to defend the multiple benefits of flying your own airplane, but nobody in aviation can rationalize the enormity of the issue these three handed to opponents of the Detroit bailout.

Luxury goods and service providers of all types are feeling the heat of the economic crisis, and the news media lumps private airplanes in with $3,000 women's purses and $500 per head cocktail parties. But airplanes are not in what I think of as the "luxury category" and they can emerge on the other side, while many lux goods probably won't.

While nobody can argue that flying in your own airplane on your own schedule to the airport most convenient to your destination isn't a form of luxury, it is most importantly a business tool that no other means of transportation can provide. Other "luxuries" are, in contrast, more expensive and fashionable items that perform the same task as lower cost counterparts. For example, a $200 watch keeps time as accurately as a $5,000 watch thanks to miniature electronics. So the difference here, or the luxury quotient of the watch, is $4,800 worth of something that can't be measured. A $20,000 car can carry you safely down the road at the speed limit and beyond, just as the $100,000 model does, so that $80,000 difference in cost has to be explained in terms of luxury. And a $2,000 diamond will keep you wed to your bride just as securely as the $50,000 rock, with the difference being settled at the divorce.

But business airplanes carry people with speed and safety to places that cannot be reached with the same efficiency by any other means. The airlines serve a few hundred airports in the United States, but business airplanes can use several thousand. Business airplanes cut travel times on many trips by hundreds of percent, and often save overnight stays, which can make any worker more productive. The fact that these and other business airplane capabilities simply can't be replaced at a lower cost means they are not luxuries in the same way as the term is generally used. A many-decades-long survey of companies that use airplanes versus those that don't shows the ones flying for business have overall better returns.

Having said all of that, there are still times when public perception of business aviation is more important than the realities of business travel. On that list of unusual trips is when you are going to ask elected officials to hand you billions of taxpayer dollars. In that case walking barefoot from Detroit to Washington would have been appropriate, or at least they could have driven one of the American-made cars they were going to tout to Congress.