Where the drive comes from: why smart businesses turn to business jet utilization.

In 1999, J.D. Power and Associates conducted a business aviation study for NBAA. The study had three main objectives:

To analyze and understand the past and present aircraft fleet utilization of organizations which operate business aircraft

To identify and understand key aircraft utilization strategies and their relative impact and importance to an organization

To identify reasons and trends for aircraft utilization increases/decreases

Below are excerpts from the document including important utilization strategies and a review as to why companies that value employee time invest in business aviation travel.

Breathless 

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 companies 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 passengers traveling weekly on business aircraft vis-a-vis public alternatives often reveals the restoration of a month annually to their lives--time formerly lost "in transit" and previously 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 family? 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 commensurate 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 suggest otherwise, but can all 11,000 CEOs really be that dumb?

Despite the judgment of those keen CEOs, the actual value-added contributions of company aircraft are not well understood, in no small part because they are difficult to measure. What's more, the full potential of company aircraft often goes unrealized because, like parenting, little formal training precedes the startup of operations. 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.

So given the magnitude of the typical corporate investment in aircraft and people, the subject's probably worth a little further study.

Remember when the fastest way to make a copy was with carbon paper, long distance phone calls actually were considered special, travel by air was still a dress-up affair and a first class postage stamp meant your letter would be there in a few days and everybody thought that a few days was just fine?

Those days are gone. E-mail, voice mail, fax, FedEx, video conferencing, pagers, cell phones, SAT phones, cable, ATMs, the Web, coach/business/first via 28 hubs and who-knows-how-many spokes, downsizing, rightsizing--"The Pacific Rim" for heaven's sake--all rule the day.

It's funny, but even with the quantum advances in communications technologies over the last century, we keep relearning that there often is no more efficient or effective way to communicate with people than by talking to them, face-to-face, and then using all our senses at full gain. That means showing up, in person. To get there, more and more companies have discovered an obvious solution.

This article was provided by the National Business Aviation Association. For more information, please visit www.nbaa.org.