Plane Conversations

I was fresh out of Mississippi State with a liberal arts degree and no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, managing a gift shop until I could make up my mind.  Then, a customer changed my life.  She worked for American Eagle Airlines and they were looking for a new agent.  Thus, I fell into a career.

After customer service training in Dallas, I returned to Columbus, Mississippi, for training on how to safely work the ramp.  To this day, 20 years later, I still walk around rather than under wings and I never walk in the prop arc.  The first thing I was told is that “you walk into a moving prop once.”  I didn’t need to be told again.

The job really was fun and a great challenge with instant feedback – the flights either departed on time or they didn’t.  Bags were either loaded correctly or not – you knew right away.  The only real feedback delay came from customer complaints or compliments.  Often, irate passengers would let you know with a quickness that they were unhappy; however, there were always those who were more of a slow simmer rather than a rapid boil.  Those passengers would wait to file a complaint with Consumer Relations. 

Each station had a report card and was rated on several elements of our operations including: baggage handling, on-time performance, and customer relations.  If a bag was mishandled, after some documentation a station was assigned responsibility and penalized.  If a flight was more than five minutes late departing from the gate because of ground handling problems or late passengers, the station was penalized. Stations were also penalized for any customer complaint unless irregularity in the customer’s claims could be documented (like with statements from airport security, which I actually had from time to time, but those are different stories).  At every station and with every team that I worked, we took these challenges seriously and did our level best to either raise or maintain our station scores.  At every station, we had the youngest group of agents and the smallest aircraft at the airport; so, we caught a great deal of ribbing from other ticket counters and sometimes from our passengers.  We saw our youth and aircraft as yet another opportunity to show that we could be better.  We worked hard and enjoyed helping to build our airline. 

It was called Nashville Eagle when I hired on, but was changed to Flagship Airlines before I left.  It didn’t matter what it was called, I loved it.  I loved the sense of community, of working together to build something we could be proud of.  Concourse D at the Nashville International Airport was home to all Eagle flights and it grew to be busy and congested, sometimes even between banks.  It was an exciting place to be.  Then, almost overnight, AMR shut it down.

Just like that, it was gone.  All of the outstations closed: Tupelo, Columbus, Tuscaloosa, Lexington, Paducah.  Everything we’d worked for years to build was dismantled in a matter of weeks and I never really understood why.  There were rumors: an ego contest between the Powers That Be, traffic within the Eagle system was good but too few passengers were connecting to American flights.  Whatever the reason, Concourse D became a wasteland.

Now, as I walk through the Nashville airport, still not entirely sure what I want to be when I grow up, I look to where the escalators descended to that old concourse, grieve a little for the airline that used to be and recite my employee number to myself – just in case anyone ever asks for it.   

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In a previous post titled “Do Business travelers Share, Would they Share” I asked the question would business travelers share a ride on a private jet if the price was right, and it saved them time ,and they got the experience of private aviation travel. Those travelers already paying the full price of flying private aircraft may not be willing to share a flight. Price might not be the controlling factor in the decision for current users of private jet travel but what about the 550 million plus passengers who will fly on US airlines this year?

When I fly on the airlines, and end up next to another person who is traveling on business, occasionally we strike up a conversation about what we do.  When I tell people I am in the aviation business, and we fly people on private jets, the business people often tell of times they have flown on their company aircraft or a vendors aircraft, and they recount the experience and how nice it was.  Others out of curiousity want to know what it is like. Most people have an idea of how nice it would be even if they have never experienced that form of travel. Everyone guesses that it is expensive and maybe only for the CEO of the big company or the music or movie celebrities. Not one single person I have ever spoken to says they would rather not try out flying on a “small jet”.

Have you ever started planning a trip for business where there are three people in your company that need to go to see a customer and you think “how nice would it be to travel on a private jet and do this in a day”,  and then you call and get a price for a Learjet from the local charter company and it is twice (or more) what the price is on the airlines?  You only need three seats but you have to buy the whole aircraft for the day. So you give up on the idea and end up booking the airline, hotel for the overnight and the rental car to drive to your ultimate destination because the airline only gets you within 70 miles of where you want to go. Thus begins the misery of everyday business travel that millions of people go through every month.

Unfortunately our flight coordinators, who answer the calls from people wanting to charter aircraft, get that scenario all too often, and we can’t find the solution for those two or three travelers who need to go somewhere becasue the whole aircraft price is just too high. As disappointed as the potential customer is, we are equally disappointed when we lose a trip because of price. We can’t run below cost and stay in business, so we shrug it off and keep going.   

Is there a way to overcome this barrier that stops so many people from using what we know to be a great means of air travel? There are a lot of empty seats, empty flight legs and underutilized aircraft sitting so there must be a solution.

What do you think?

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Sounds like a country song, doesn’t it?  In fact, it was an epiphany for a cousin of mine.

My cousin is an attorney who, for years, has bought into the whole “private plane = capitalist excess” story the media sells.  As a result, he has long given me a hard time about what I do for a living.  Until, that is, he needed to travel from Jackson, Mississippi, to Texarkana, Texas.

He discovered that to maximize his time on-site, he had to leave Jackson at 6 AM, connect in Dallas to arrive in Texarkana at 10:35 - spending four hours and thirty-five minutes in transit.  The latest he could leave Texarkana was at 4:55 PM, connect again in Dallas to arrive Jackson at 10:05 – spending five hours and ten minutes in transit.  That adds up to nine hours and forty-five minutes spent in travel time alone. Add a minimum of a one hour spent in the airports both in the morning and in the afternoon and you have a hefty eleven hours forty-five minutes spent in airports and on airplanes, with only about 4.5 hours of useful time on-site.  The ticket price for this hideous proposition weighs in at $ 1316.80. 

I have no idea what he bills for his time; so, let’s just say it’s $400 an hour to be on the safe side.  The cost of his travel time alone is now $ 4680.00, plus the ticket price.  The cost to his client for non-productive time and actual expense is then $ 5996.80, and he hasn’t deposed the first witness or written the first clause yet.

Instead of taking the air mass-transit option on this trip, he actually flew in a Cirrus aircraft.  Flight time from Jackson to Texarkana is about an hour and eighteen minutes.  He showed up at the airport ten minutes prior to departure and the cost of the charter was somewhere in the neighborhood of $ 1700.00.  Sure, that price is higher than the airline seat; however, the total time he spent traveling was around two hours thirty six minutes, with an extra 20 minutes spent hanging around the airport.  Using the same formula we used before, the value of that time is about $ 3600.00, giving us a total cost of $ 5300.00.

“That’s really not that much difference, Yoda.” 

Ah, but it is, Young Skywalker.  Because less time is wasted in-transit, more productive time is spent on the ground.  This probably translates to less total time on the ground, which translates to fewer billable hours to the client.  So, that roughly $ 700 savings we can see just with a cursory look will almost surely be higher in a real-world scenario. 

That is just a dollars and cents look at the cost of both his time and actual air transportation.  We’re not even talking about other travel related costs or the human cost factors of a person who has been awake and traveling for 19 hours.  We’re not measuring mental acuity while in Texarkana at actual meetings or when back in Jackson, working the following day.  Once you really examine all of those costs, you can see that travel by private aircraft is not just a reasonable option – it’s the best one.

And once you see that, you, like my cousin, will be a believer.

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In 2001, Atlantic Monthly national correspondent and best selling author James Fallows wrote a book called “Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel”. I got a copy as a gift from a friend and, as an aviation insider, read it with great interest. Plus, I love the title which, after nine years, is still relevant.

When he wrote the book, he focused on three innovations that he predicted would revolutionize air travel by providing private air transportation to the frustrated airline traveler at rates more people could afford. Pulling the book out of my cabinet at the office and knocking the dust off, I revisited what James Fallows had to say then and compare it to where we are today.

What were the three innovations?:

1. Cirrus and the Klapmeier brothers who dreamed up the idea of a single engine aircraft with a parachute system for that extra measure of safety.
2. Eclipse Jet and Vern Rayburn who brought the term Very Light Jet into the conversation of business aviation.
3. NASA who encouraged innovation in aircraft design and the development of free flight which allows aircraft to go directly from Point A to Point B saving time, fuel and traffic congestion of highly traveled airways.  This was under the NASA’s Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) program. The idea was to make personal flying closer to the automobile experience – safer and easier to be within reach of more travelers allowing people to bypass the air mass-transit system in favor of going from small airport to small airport.

In the last nine years, how did James Fallows’ case studies fare?

To date, Cirrus has manufactured and sold more than 5000 aircraft and has been the number one, best selling aircraft in the past decade – not bad for a start-up company with a non-conventional design. Like other aviation companies, Cirrus has been severely impacted by the economy but will survive in some form. The aircraft has been too successful and the market will continue to demand new models with improved technology.

Eclipse ran the long race to certification and actually made a few Eclipse jets before passing out at the finish line. Eclipse didn’t make it; but, urged on by the innovation, Cessna and Embraer were able to come out with the Cessna Mustang and the Phenom 100, which are here to stay.

Cirrus proved the SATS concept by bringing a whole new user of private aviation into the fold and, today, more people are flying small aircraft. No one knows the exact number, but many Cirrus buyers were first-time aviators who were convinced that they could learn to fly and safely pilot the Cirrus aircraft wherever they needed to go for business or pleasure. Flying is still not as simple as driving, but, every year it gets easier and safer due to the technology of the modern cockpit. One day it may be the George Jetson story!

Somewhere in the story was the hope that airline delays and traffic congestion problems could be solved by technology. Today, the talk is of Next Generation Air Traffic Control Technology (NexGen) which would help; but, the problem of “ Airline Hell” has still not been solved. If anything, it has only gotten “hotter” (worse). Today, nine years later, there is more frustration than ever before with the airline system. The solutions are out there but have yet to be implemented. In 2001 Web2.0, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn had not been dreamed into existence. So, is the solution an aviation solution or does it come from technology?

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It Was Such a Great Idea! What Happened?

SATSair

Of all the startups of air taxi / charter companies from the past few years, I would have given SATS Air the best chance to succeed.  Being in the FBO (private aviation terminal)  business at two airports, I have seen their aircraft come in on numerous occasions.  I met a couple of their pilots in the lobby of our operation who were very professional and customer service oriented.  They had a great idea.  They had the support of Cirrus with new aircraft  in a market niche that no one else was filling.

Quoting the article in Flightglobal.com, “Arguably the most successful single-engine aircraft air taxi company in the US, SATSair had in the past five years built a fleet of 26 Cirrus SR22 aircraft that accumulated 60,000 flight hours and 13 million revenue seat miles.” That is impressive for a single engine air taxi company.

George Larson’s article in Aviation Week quotes SATS Air President and CEO Stephan Hanvey ”We know our business model works,” Hanvey insisted.   George Larson goes on to say in his article: Although he declined to go into the reasons for the apparent temporary halt in the company’s “air cab” operations, he acknowledged that the decline in the U.S. national economy has undoubtedly played a role. The timing of the announcement suggested that the decision was based on an eleventh-hour development.

SATS Air paved the way for a new user of aircraft charter or air taxi service.  Their pricing and point-to-point service was competitive and efficient for travelers moving from small markets to other small and medium travel markets. They broke the barrier by proving that travelers were willing to fly on a single engine propeller aircraft in the name of efficiency and time savings.  A few years ago when SATS Air was just getting into the market, I spoke with one of our regular charter customers who chartered our Lear 45.  He was always adamant about flying on a newer aircraft and would not charter our Lear 35 aircraft because they were “older”.  Even he told me in that conversation that he had tried SATS Air and loved the service.  He was the proof that some travelers will get on a small single engine aircraft if it is new even though he would not ride on an older Lear.  I haven’t forgotten that lesson.

So what happened?  It is too early to tell   and without access to information from an insider perspective we  may not ever know.

Having fought this economy for the last 18 months, I will not be a Sunday afternoon armchair quarterback and criticize the management of SATS Air.  Besides, as John Donne noted, what diminishes one of us, diminishes us all.

It is a tough market and everyone in our industry has taken a beating – some more than others.  It is the most challenging time I have seen in all of the 27 years I have been doing this.

What I do know about how business works in this country is that best  innovation can happen in the most challenging of times.  When pressed hard, we come up with new and better ways to do what we do.  In business and general aviation, what we provide is a time saving machine – the private aircraft.  What seems to be the limiting factor for our success is our current inability to efficiently lower costs to get the supply of private jet travel services to the market in a profitable way.  I am confident that there is a solution out there, we just have to find it.

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