A Guide For Management
Business Aircraft Utilization Strategies
Including Results from a J.D. Power and Associates Survey of Companies Operating Turbine-Powered Aircraft in the United States
The idea usually begins with an executive hunch, triggered by a combination of realizations: that being there, face-to-face, is an absolute necessity. That time is acutely limited and increasingly valuable. That there are genuinely efficient and productive ways to travel, and lesser options. And that the market penalizes the slow and rewards the quick.
At the end of the 60s, about 2,000 companies in the United States operated their own aircraft. Since then, the number of business aircraft operators has grown by a factor of 5.5, while airline business travel has grown by a factor of less than 3. Today, more than 11,000 companies and organizations operate more than 17,000 turbine-powered aircraft. More than 30,000 additional compa nies operate piston-powered aircraft and thousands more charter.
Surveys reveal that they do so primarily to save employee time. A minute-by-minute analysis of passen gers traveling weekly on business aircraft vis-à-vis public alternatives often reveals the restoration of a month annually to their lives – time formerly lost “in transit” and previous ly just chalked up to, well, business.
A month. Just what do you do with an “extra” month? Get a leg up on the competition? Spend it with your fami ly? And what does an “extra” month or so every year mean over a decade, or a career, or to a marriage?
Just how does your company value employee time?
Passengers, even infrequent ones, also cite better industrial security, maximum control over safety options, the best possible control over efficient, reliable scheduling, the projection of a positive corporate image, a reduction in post-trip fatigue and a commensu rate increase in post-trip productivity, a boost to entrepreneurial spirits and an end to worrying about luggage, lines, waiting, connections, center seats, upset babies and odd food.
In all, there seems to be a natural synergy between the increasing demands on a company’s two most important assets – people and time – and the use of business aircraft. Today, on Main Street in Corporate America, company aircraft increasingly are just an ordinary business travel option, appropriate for certain trips and less so for others better taken via the airlines, train or car. And even though they may appear to be expensive (and, superficially, by most every conventional measure, they are), a deeper analysis reveals that business aircraft are often the least expensive way to travel when all costs and benefits are considered.
This is not a large typo. Junior employees have been known to sug gest otherwise, but can all 11,000 CEOs really be that dumb?
CLEVELAND, BURKE LAKEFRONT AIRPORT
Despite the judgment of those keen CEOs, the actual value-added contri butions of company aircraft are not well understood, in no small part because they are difficult to measure. What’s more, the full potential of com pany aircraft often goes unrealized because, like parenting, little formal training precedes the startup of opera tions. Consequently, most managers just learn as they go. It’s not their fault; they are experts at other things. Creating “business aircraft utilization strategies” usually isn’t one of them. Maximizing return on company investments, however, is.
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