Plane Conversations

Social Flights is featuring this property sharing opportunity from AirBnB.com and it’s owner to present a unique way to visit the Olympic Peninsula and the Olympic National Park in the State of Washington. This is the first time we’ve done this because it is a great way to demonstrate the versatility of Private Social Travel.

Cinnamon Bear Cabin is walking distance to the (semi) private and uncrowded Lake Cushman Golf Course and within a few miles of three amazing bodies of water; Lake Cushman, Lake Kokanee, and the Hood Canal (actually a Fjord remnant of the ice ages).  Hood Canal is known for crystal clear saltwater scuba diving, crabbing, clam digging and seasonal salmon fishing.  Lake Cushman is a 4000 acre  glacier fed lake at the foot of 7000 ft mount Washington in the Olympic Range.  Lake Kokanee sits below the Lake Cushman dam and offers a serene  trout fishing experience through its meandering canyons.

The nearest commercial airport is 2 hours away, but Social Flights can bring you and your group directly into Sanderson Field in a private aircraft from anywhere in the US, less than 15 minutes from this very special location where you will pick up your car, keys, and license for fun and adventure.

Olympic National Park is comprised of nearly 1 million acres of the Olympic Mountain range. The Olympics literally halted the glaciers that carved the surrounding geography many thousands of years ago and are now home to unique species and wildlife ecosystems.  The ONP is one of the last remaining temperate rain forests in the World with ancient old growth featuring trees of astonishing size.  Yes we all know of the great sequoias of California, but Imagine cedars, douglas firs, sitka spruce, and hemlock trees 15 ft in diameter and up to 300 feet tall.

Indian heritage is alive and dominant in several areas offering cultural and recreational opportunities found nowhere else.  You can also visit Lake Quinault, The Western shores, and many hot spring locations all easily accessible from Cinnamon Bear Cabin.  In the Northern portion of ONP, you’ll find crystal clear Crescent Lake - a body of water so rare and so old that it’s the home of some species of fishes that exist nowhere else on Earth. Crescent Lake is called a “National Treasure” with 5 stars on TripAdvisor.com

Hiking, camping, Kayaking, festivals, casinos, local artisans, scuba diving, golfing, fishing, sky diving, are all abundant in the Olympic Peninsula.  What you will not find are crowds, tourist traps, tourist crime, pollution, blight, traffic, and harassment.  The Olympic Peninsula has one of the lowest population densities in the US. Local prices are local prices and not tourist prices.  Cinnamon Bear Cabin is perfect for people who want to experience the best of the Pacific Northwest without needing a vacation from their vacation afterwards.

The choice is yours, you can navigate the Gauntlet of the travel industry whose sole purpose is to drive revenue, add fees, sell advertising impressions, waste your time, and reach into your wallet at every fork and bend  on the roads most traveled. Or, you can go for a private experience with all the cherished memories that you expect for your time and money at a cost that is comparable to anything that the commercial travel “processing” industry has to offer. It’s about a colors of time for your money, not the colors of money for your time. You live once, make it count

Amazing new innovations continue to appear in the travel segment.  This is understandable.  When a person leaves their home, all the things that a home provides can now be offered up as a product. From sleeping comfort, to safety, to community; “home-on-the-road” is big business.

Planning a trip is getting easier and faster.  The problem is that there are so many options available that YOUR best options rarely appear in the first few pages of a Google Search.  Increasingly, the traveler needs to interface with someone who really knows your “home-on-the-road” as if it were their own.

via Stay.com Takes Social a Step Further This Week – {Travel Daily News}.

Norwegian travel guide/trip planning startup Stay.com has just announced a new set of features to an already award winning travel platform. Named Time Magazine’s top travel site of 2010, Stay offers a new take on DIY trip planning. This week’s news centers around travel guide building using tips from various social networks.

The idea is that people can find all of their needs at the destination of interest, download their “tourist map” to their cell phone, and then ask their friends on social networks for recommendations. It would seem that Stay.com tends to favor larger metropolitan areas where more people have visited as well as the more famous landmarks rather than that perfect hole in the wall.  What happens when you get competing or conflicting recommendations? I also wonder if a wide social network converges to a more focused assessment of quality, or diverges to less focused assessments.

At Social Flights we have a mirror-image situation.  We search for all the people who want to know more about a certain subject, opportunity, or location and we seek to match them with people who know a great deal about that subject, opportunity, or location.  Then we’ll use our private aircraft to bring these people together for a truly valuable experience.   Together, such person matching represents supply and demand in their own private economy.  This is the same situation that hotels, restaurants, and tourist attractions have.  I would imagine demand for such a service would be stout.

When social media applications learn how to form and use a knowledge inventory, home-on-the-road applications will deliver an everlasting travel experience as well as an ever expanding and relevant social network. Our bet is that innovative companies like Stay.com will eventually arrive at this magical place of perfect information.

Steven Frischling, aka: Fish, is a globe hopping airline emerging media consultant, one of our favorite bloggers, and a trusted advisor.  He has an uncanny ability to identify relevant trends with equal ability for compiling supporting data into useful forms.  In his recent post, Steve compiled a list for the percentage of twitter communications from airlines that contained the word “sorry” (or the equivalent in the language of the airline).

See the original post for details on how he compiled the following list:

So who is the most apologetic airline?  Its not about how many times they say they are sorry, it is the percent of times they say they are sorry.

@British_Airways - 3,766 in 20,757 tweets, 18.14%

@QantasAirways - 2,185 in 14,595 tweets, 14.97%

@AmericanAir - 2,232 in 15,432 tweets, 14.46%

@SingaporeAir - 43 in 385 tweets, 11.16%

@SAS – 238 (in Norwegian 88) in 3,457 tweets, 9.43%

@SouthwestAir – 711 in 8,092 tweets, 8.78%

@Delta – 299 in 4,211 tweets, 7.10%

@AirCanada - 167 in 3,356 tweets, 4.97%

@USAirways – 80 in 2,149 tweets, 3.72%

@United - 66 in 1,897 tweets, 3.47%

@KLM – 826 in 30,563 tweets, 2.7%

@MAS – 69 in 3,740 tweets, 1.84%

@GulfAir – 32 in 1,918 tweets, 1.66%

@AirBaltic - 52 in 3,172 tweets, 1.63%

@RoyalBruneiAir – 17 in 1,348 tweets, 1.26%

Sorry by Surprise

In a recent conversation with Steve, he mentioned that airlines called him up to find out HOW he was able to compile this information.  More important in our minds is, how can the airlines not know how to compile this information?

Apologies are very important because people do respond to a personal touch, so kudos to the airlines that have strong satisfaction outreach programs.  On the other hand, apologies are an opportunity for a company to improve and management should take an opportunity to review “sorry” data.

The “insurance” approach.

Insurance is something that pays out after the failure occured.  For example, AirBnB (a home sharing service) offers an insurance payout if your home is trashed by a renter from their network. Insurance utterly fails to compensate the victim for personal, physical, and emotional losses.  Airlines most often compensate a traveler with a free ticket and nothing else – they should be looking for route cause or they may find their selves on one of Steve’s lists.

Social Flights responds with a very simple solution; our ride sharing service and community air service program.

By eliminating many of the breakdown points of the complex and overloaded hub and spoke system, Social flights can reduce the number of situations where an apology may be required. When a community can literally operate their own airline to their own schedule from their own airport, they eliminate delays due to traffic, parking, long lines, delays, connections, service fees, congestion, overnights, and a host of traveller harassment.

Go ahead and forgive, but don’t forget that there are options…

There’s an old song from the World War II generation that says, “Wishing will make it so…”.  Buddy DeSylva’s lyrics speak of hope, optimism, and belief.  Yet wishing can’t give you more hours in a day, or more productivity while travelling, or access to places difficult to reach.

Flying can make it so.

That being said, we need to tell our stories, ways that aviation assists us daily in carrying on our various activities and work.  This is partially because we gain strength and synergy when we see that there are others much like us who know and understand the real benefit of flying.  This doesn’t have to be a $20million dollar corporate jet.  It can be as simple as a Diamond DA-40.  It’s the story of the DA-40 that I want to pass on to you today.

Last week our company’s CEO, VP of Sales, and I took a DA-40 to visit a customer in Jonesboro, AR.  We then had a pop-up visit with a lead in Little Rock, AR.  We then lunched in Tunica, MS on our way home (no gambling, just food) and returned home in time for a local Chamber event in our hangar.

The plane, by business aircraft  norms, was really modest.  In fact, a LearJet pilot teased me as I preflighted my plane parked next to his.  The only refreshments were in the small cooler I packed with green tea, water, and peanut butter crackers on my way to the airport that morning.   The only in-flight entertainment was an iPad.   And the air conditioning?  On this 97+ degree day, it was inoperative.  So we climbed until we felt comfortable at 60 or so degrees at 7,000 feet.

And yet, even in this basic small aircraft we were able to condense over 14 hours of drive time into 6.2 flight hours.  Had we driven we would have certainly been out overnight in order to drive and have time for our meetings.  And while it was a long day, it was an easy day.  So we made our rounds, saw our clients, and returned before dark.

Yes, aircraft are fun.  Some aircraft are luxurious.  Some aircraft are expensive and some are not.  But for the businesses that operate them, they are tools.  Their value in time savings and multiplied productivity is astonishing.

Flying can make it so.

Click on pen to

Ancient writers often referred to two types of time: kairos time and chronos time.  Chronos is linear time and measures things in a sequence.  First this, then that.  Kairos time can be loosely defined as the “right” time or the “opportune” time.  Think of it this way, if you stand over home plate and repeatedly swing a baseball bat in regular intervals, you are participating in a chronos event.  If, however, you wait and swing just as the baseball crosses the plate and make solid contact that sends the ball over the left field fence, you have just participated in a kairos moment.

In your business, which type of time do you prefer?

At Corporate Flight Management our motto is “Time Creates Opportunity”.  But it isn’t just any time.  It is kairos time that creates the opportunity.  Private corporate aviation can create this opportunity for you and your business.  It is about being in the right place at the right time, whether that is closing a critical deal or being home in time for that important family event.

If you’re trying to achieve this with the airlines, you’re stuck in their time –chronos time.  And you know that it is anything but opportune and eminently frustrating.  The good news is that there is an alternative to the norm of airline travel and it is far more available and affordable than you might imagine.

Corporate aviation can help you and your company manage the one resource you simply can’t create more of: time.   When you are able to manage your time and your company’s time more efficiently and cost-effectively, you generate many more kairos moments.

Don’t just swing and hope the bat connects.  Be in the right place, at the right time and swing for the fence.

After all, “Time Creates Opportunity.”

Click on pen to

“Do you have 1000 hours of experience of 1 hour’s experience repeated 1000 times?”

I believe I first heard this question from the Godfather of General Aviation, Richard Collins.  It’s a great question that gets at the heart of our flying habits and willingness to stretch ourselves in our flying.

Some pilots fly under, and only under, very tight circumstances.  They look for CAVU (Clear Air Visibility Unlimited) days with less than 5 knots of wind (never a crosswind), only in the morning, only at their home field and never stray from their local area.  It’s great that they are flying, but they are going to have basically one hour of flight repeated 1000 times.  What a shame because flying offers you and I so much more!

It is far better, and more fun and rewarding, to gain 1000 hours of flight experience.  Go somewhere.  Make a trip an adventure.  Challenge yourself.  Fly to a Class C airport and have dinner.  Master the crosswind landing.  Learn to fly safely in something other than a CAVU sky.  If you need an instructor to help you gain comfort and confidence in some of these situations, then book one today.

Certainly, there will be flights that are similar.  My point (and I think Dick Collins’ point also) is that a variety of experiences and situations help us to become a well-rounded and proficient pilot.   I think in the end, this approach will also keep your flying fun!

So, fly often and always be looking for a new challenge!

Click on pen to

A LA Times article by Hugo Martín discusses what those who travel on the airline have experienced in the past year and it looks like we can expect more of the same in 2011.

Passenger demand has returned with the upturn in the economy and airlines have limited their growth in inventory (seats) in order to make a profit by increasing their yield per flight. Less empty seats means more control over pricing and greater yields per flight. Simple supply and demand economics.

That’s all great if you are on the selling side of that equation. If you are on the buying side it increases the likelihood that you will get bumped off a flight. When a flight cancels your next flight out may be the next day, not a few hours later, because that next flight in a few hours is already sold out.

Load factors in this article for Delta and United are running at around 84%. Load factors at that level mean a lot of flights are full at peak times and many are oversold. I don’t mind a full flight if you just get me home on time and don’t lose my stuff. I do mind it when you cancel the flight and tell me you will get me home the next day.

The LA Times article posts some interesting comments from a survey by Zagat of 8000 frequent fliers:

* The only thing missing is a blindfold and a cigarette.

* My bags get better service, but they pay extra.

* The only difference between economy and business classes is a shrimp on your salad.

* “Unwelcome aboard!”

* I don’t love getting up-close-and-personal with the head of the person in front of me.

* Who made them mad at their customers?

* Entree selections should be labeled “choose your poison.”

* When two crummy medium-size airlines merge, all you get is a crummy large airline.

* Seats make an iron maiden seem comfortable.

Business Aviation continues to have unprecedented opportunities to meet the market of frustrated travelers with a better proposition. As airlines turn into mass transit systems that sell a commodity (seats) are there still people willing to pay for service? More importantly can business aviation save time over airline travel and do people value their time more or less in today’s economy?

I think I know the answer but from my viewpoint I am biased. If the airlines just got me there on time I think I could tolerate the rest. But when I don’t get there on time then all of the service failings start to really get to me. Too much time in a crowded terminal waiting on that “next flight” is not good for travelers to reflect on the experience

Click on pen to

My son came home from school one day with a classroom story I found disturbing.  It was at the beginning of the school year and the teacher asked each student to introduce themselves and to tell what their career goals were.  One student stated that he wanted to be a famous rap artist.  The teacher’s advice to the student was to pick another career, he’d never make it in that one.

I’m sure that there were plenty of people who gave the same advice to Marshall Mathers and Curtis Jackson; but, apparently neither Eminem nor 50 Cent took notice of the naysayers. 

Several months ago, I read a blog entitled Misfit Entrepreneurs that really stuck with me.  In the blog, Dan Pallotta wonders how Bruce Springsteen could communicate his aspirations to his father, “How does he tell his father, ‘I’m going to be Bruce Springsteen?’ “  How does any true visionary communicate their vision to the rest of us?  How can they explain their dream to expand or alter a current reality?  How can they define what we can’t even imagine?

At the moment, my son wants to be a stand-up comedian.  He’s pretty hilarious; so, this may be a good fit for him.  I remind him that the path is difficult and that the price, in terms of work, will be high.  However, if Jerry Seinfeld can do it, I don’t see why my son wouldn’t be able to – provided he’s willing to do the work.  Those are the real keys, aren’t they?  We must be able to envision the goal and we must be willing to do the work.

In the charter side of Business and General Aviation, we often talk about the problems in our industry.  Operators all over the country have shut down.  Those of us still flying struggle with ever-thinner margins.  Customers want more stringent standards; but, they often want to pay less for them.  The market is unwilling to pay price increases that keep pace with cost increases.  How can we continue to operate under these circumstances?  We operate smarter.

But, we can’t operate smarter until we change the way we view ourselves and our product.  We have to envision ourselves as Bruce Springsteen before we can actually translate the vision to reality.  We have to stop seeing our industry only for what it is and, instead, see it for what it can be.  What if we can increase fleet utilization without substantially increasing costs?  What if we can increase our margins simply be changing our customer base?  What if we could increase our customer base by tenfold?

What if I told you that we can?  What if I told you that the vision was becoming reality right on the horizon?  Would you be willing to envision it?  Would you be willing to work on it with us? 

We can do it.  After all, Bruce Springsteen exists.

Click on pen to

When you and I visited last, Leon and I were at Wal-Mart buying emergency clothes and supplies since our bags were lost. I honestly thought (hoped) that would be the end of the trip drama.

Later that day, our bags showed up on the doorstep where we were staying; so, we finally had our stuff.

Tuesday night’s business dinner went late; and, we had a Wednesday morning meeting before we would leave Danbury to drive to White Plains (HPN) to catch our 11:30 departure for home.  That was the plan, anyway.

Wednesday morning there was a voice message on Leon’s cell phone notifying us the 11:30 am flight out of HPN had been canceled and that we had been rebooked on a 6:05am flight. The message was sent sometime Tuesday night while we were at dinner; but. we did not get the message. He received a text message at 6:10am saying that we were booked on the 6:05am flight (you know, the one that left five minutes ago?). For us to have made that flight, we would have had to have left Danbury about 4:15 am Wednesday morning, missing our Wednesday morning meeting completely.

After calling the help desk at Delta, we were able to get a flight out of La Guardia at 3:30pm, going non-stop to Nashville.

This wasn’t toobad since it gave us a little more time for business at Danbury.  Great.  So, we left Danbury around noon for the hour and a half drive to New York’s La Guardia airport. When we were within sight of the terminal building, I got a computer call from Delta notifying us that our 3:30pm flight had been canceled due to weather in Nashville and that we had been rebooked on a Thursday morning flight departing at  8:10am.  You’re kidding me, right?

Trying to figure out how to reduce the costs of this change, we returned the rental car, checked into an airport hotel and the day was over.

Delta had canceled all flights Wednesday afternoon into Nashville (BNA) due to forecasted surface icing conditions. I appreciate the seriousness of freezing rain and what it does to an aircraft; but, interestingly, Southwest and other carriers continued to fly into BNA all Wednesday afternoon and evening.

I wonder if the cancellations had anything to do with the “passenger bill of rights” and the new penalties for people who are left stranded on aircraft or in terminals. Maybe not, but the cancellation of that many flights for a chance of bad weather seems like a very aggressive cancellation policy.

Our next trip to Danbury will be in a Cirrus SR-22 or on Southwest to Hartford, Connecticut’s Bradley / Windsor Locks Airport if the weather is too bad for the Cirrus. No more La Guardia. How much productivity is lost by traveling in this system? The FAA study says about $33 billion per year in lost time. I don’t know exactly how they came up with that number; but, I would dare say that they have not even scratched the surface of true losses since they have no way today to measure the wear and tear on the human mind and body from traveling through the airline system.   

Bottom line: The trip home got us back to Nashville one day late with travel time Danbury to home base at Smyrna was 22 hours. I think that got us down to about 45 mph average trip speed.  In the 1930’s, Delta Air Lines advertised “Speed, Comfort and Convenience.”  Not so much.

Click on pen to