Plane Conversations

I have been around private aviation all of my life - literally grew up at the small airport; so, I come with a different perspective of private aviation than the majority of travelers in the United States and, for that matter, in the world.

I had probably ridden on hundreds of flights in small airplanes before I took my first ride on an American Airlines 707 in 1967.

As a kid, I took it for granted that flying somewhere in a small airplane was normal and, for sure, fun to do.  I never really thought about how efficient it was or wasn’t. For kids it is not about efficiency and time; it is about the experience of the moment. So, riding on the 707 for the first time was maybe the coolest thing I had done in my seven years on this earth. Riding with my Dad in a Piper Cherokee Six was just plane fun, but it was an everyday thing.  

When I grew up and went to work, it all became about time and efficiency and less about experience.  The world is now moving at the speed of the internet, which did not exist when I was a kid. I am in a business that provides aviation services, including private jet travel. Now, it is all about efficiency, time savings and the experience wrapped up together in a 500 mph machine called a business jet.  

I still ride on the airlines a lot. I can’t afford to fly on our own aircraft on many trips, because it is just a couple of us traveling and it doesn’t make sense. So, I reluctantly go through the same drudgery that every other road warrior goes through because sometimes you just have to go and price does matter.  However, I know what the experience of flying private aircraft is like.  I think about the problem of making it affordable, so that the many can experience what the few know to be a really great way to travel. I think about it some days until my head hurts.

A lot of technology inventions start out expensive but they become affordable for the masses. Not yet with the business jet! 

Do you remember the first price of the big screen plasma TV? Was it $7000 dollars? I looked at the sales ads on these TV’s for three years and month by month the price went down.  When the prices went below $1000 for that same $7000 TV, I was the proud owner of the not-so-new technology, but still nice TV.  

So how do we make Private Aviation affordable for the many and not just the few?

It already is affordable in many instances, but the market is just not aware of or may not be ready to fly in a small, single-engine, prop plane like I grew up flying around in.

So you want to fly only in an aircraft with two jet engines?  Today, that is not affordable relative to the airline prices when you have to buy the whole aircraft even though there may be only two people traveling together.

I am not sure if the exact number is out there but my guess is that less than 5% of all travel by air is done through private or general aviation.

So the “few” today is a small number of the market, but through innovation, the “few” needs to become the “many.”

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