Company pilot Tony Wright and I just returned from the Michigan Lodging and Tourism Association’s (MLTA) conference hosted by the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.  All I can say is WOW!  We met some of the nicest people in the industry and everyone we met was truly interested in the industry and the State of Michigan.

Being born and raised in Michigan, I have a special love of the state and our resources.  That is one of the reasons I would love to do more scheduled charters “Up North” to places like Traverse City, Mackinac, Munising and Marquette.  I hope with everyone’s help — customers, Resorts and my partners, that we can put something together to get people spending money again in the state.  After traveling all over the country and the world, I find that Michigan has  a little bit of every thing you can see in the other states.  Along the Pictured Rocks I am reminded of the Pali coast in Kauai, In Copper Harbor I am reminded of the North East coast.  From the top of Mackinac Island, the multi-colored waters of the straits remind me of the Caribbean.

I also wanted to thank the MLTA for putting on such a great and informative conference and  opening it up to non-members.  I hope to join as a service member soon.  Every company that is in any way involved with the tourism industry should be a member,  without the MLTA funding the Pure Michigan campaign would have be cut to ineffective levels.

American Business Airways has a program to reduce your travel costs by pooling your flight with other customers wanting to travel to the same areas.   Assume you are considering a flight to Traverse City with your family of 3.  Although the round trip cost for this with an overnight stay would come to about $2500 with taxes and overnight fees, (about $833 per person) you would like to reduce this cost further.  Call us and we will gather names of other customers also wanting to fly to the same general area  (Northern Lower Michigan) and put together a shared flight.  With 3 more passengers, this can reduce the cost to $416 per person.

We are also planning on operating a scheduled charter to the Traverse City and Mackinac Island airports over the weekends.  This will only operate if we can get enough passengers to sign up.  This is a special and not a regular charter, and the prices will be $300 to Traverse City and $350 to Mackinac Island.  We will need a minimum of 4 passengers.  The flights will leave Friday afternoon and return Sunday afternoon. This then is a variation on the shared ride concept.

So if you are interested in sharing a ride anywhere or in our scheduled charter flights “up north”. call us and get on the list.

Also call us for specialized business charter flights.  Many times we can beat the airlines on total travel and employee costs.

Check our blog report on justifying air travel.

Posted April 6, 2009 by Michael J. Ryan

It’s Monday morning, April 6 at your office in Pontiac, MI. You just found out that three of you need to be in Canton, Ohio Wednesday April 8 for an important sales meeting. The client wants to meet at 2:00 PM and told you to expect to be there until 5:00. Here are your choices:

Driving: MapQuest shows it takes four hours to drive 233 miles each way. You’ll need to start at 9:00 AM to allow for a rest stop and a lunch break. The return trip will start at 5:00 PM when the meeting ends. You’ll get back to Pontiac at 10 PM. Total travel time 10 hours. This saves the most money but wastes the most time for all three travelers.

Airlines: It’s a good thing you checked Travelocity right away, because there were only a few non-stop airline seats left! Unfortunately, you’re buying the tickets at the last minute and pay full fare coach. You leave the office at 10:00 AM to drive to Detroit Metro, park, check in, go through airport security, and hike out to your gate. Your flight departs at 11:58 AM and arrives at 12:53 PM. You’ll need to kill an hour in Canton waiting for your meeting to start, so you might as well have lunch. When the meeting’s over, you can go out to dinner, because the return flight isn’t until 7:02 PM. The tickets cost a total of $1,713.60 for the three of you.

Charter: You drive over to Oakland County Airport for your charter flight on American Business Airways at 12:30 PM. All three of you had productive mornings in the office or calling on local clients. You’ll find a box lunch on board to eat on your one hour flight to the Canton-Akron Airport. Arriving at 1:30, your rental car pulls right up to the plane. You drive out of the airport five minutes after landing and head over to the client’s office. When the meeting ends, you head back to the plane and take off about 5:30 PM for the one hour flight to Oakland County. You’ll enjoy some light snacks and a cold beer on the flight home, discussing in complete privacy everyone’s comments from the successful sales meeting where you closed the biggest sale so far this quarter. Landing at 6:30, everyone heads home for a late dinner with their families. The cost was $1,524. Really!

Comparison

·    Driving wasted 15 business hours and 15 personal hours, and was the lowest cost.

·    Airlines wasted 9 business hours outbound and 9 personal hours on the return, and cost the most because you bought your tickets at the last minute, paying full fare coach. The combined airfare was $ 1,713.60.

·    Charter didn’t waste any time at all. And best of all, you saved $189.60 by flying privately on American Business Airways.

Does It Always Work Like That?

No, it does not. But anytime you find yourself paying full-fare coach, and two or more of you are going to the same place, give American Business Airways a call at 248.444.5202 for a price comparison…and don’t forget to compare the time savings, too!

(Ryan is president of AirPSG, LLC and can be reached at mike.ryan@airpsg.com, 800.769.6082 or www.airpsg.com )

If your company is trying to economize on your travel budget and you have been chartering a turbo prop or jet aircraft, consider a cabin class piston twin instead.

Many times, companies require company personnel to use turbine powered equipment.  The reason is the statistical increase in safety of this class of airplane.  Turbine powered airplanes use either a jet or turbo prop engine.  the difference between a “pure” jet and a turbo prop is how the motive force of the engine is produced.  In a jet, the hot gases exiting the tail pipe push the airplane through the air, in a turbo prop, the hot exhaust gases spin turbine that is connected to a gear box and propeller.

In a piston powerd airplane, the engine is an air cooled version of the engine in your car, the motive force comes from the turning propeller.  So the main differeance between a turbo prop aircraft and a piston powered airplane is the actual engine that is turning the propeller.

Turbine engine airplanes have a higher reliability rate and a higher power to weight ratio.  This means most turbine engine powered airplanes will climb better with one engine inoperative than will a piston powered airplane.  This is where the statistically improved safety of turbines comes from.  But let’s look at that safety record.  Most turbine powered airplanes are piloted by professional full time crews who undergo recurrent training, usually in a simulator.  By contrast, piston powered twins are flown by both a large number of professionals and also private pilots.  In addition, not all private pilots go through the high quality training of the professionals even though they are flying the same type of airplane.  When the statistics are calculated, the safety record of the entire fleet is considered and you would expect the safety records of the piston twin aircraft flown by private individuals to be lower,  this would lower the safety record of ALL piston twins.

Here at American Business Airways, we believe there is a lot a company can do to increase the level of safety to our customers flying in light twins.  Some of the methods we use are the same as those used to fly turbine powered equipment.  Although all jets and most turbo props can continue a takeoff if an engine fails just before lift off, most piston powered twins cannot.  Here at American Business Airways, we allow more runway in order to stop should an engine fail at lift off, this is called an ” accelerate stop distance” and it is not required by the FAA to be calculated for small twins either turbo prop or piston powered.  All large aircraft and all jets must calculate the accelerate stop distance and also the distance to continue the take off in the event of engine failure.

To mitigate the concerne that the piston twin can not take off and climb on one engine until the gear is up, we require our pilots to have a runway that exceeds the accelerate stop distance, thus giving them the oppourtunity to bring the airplane to a safe stop in the event of an engine failure, we also require them to retract the gear as soon as possible on takeoff, once there is no longer enough runway left to land on, so the airplane will be able to climb should an engine fail.  The time when the airplane may not climb is reduced to 1 or 2 seconds after takeoff.

Ok, so we can stop on takeoff if need be, and we can climb on 1 engine after the gear is up, how do we ensure safety even for those few seconds when the airplane is in the air but the gear is still retracting?  The short answer is maintenance.  At American Business Airways, we perform oil analysis on each engine.  Oil analysis looks at the oil for wear metals that indicate a problem might be developing in the engine that warrants investigating.  In this way we can find problems before they cause a failure.  Additionally, we use trend monitoring.  During cruise, our pilots record all engine and airframe parameters and engine readings,  these are reviewed by the maintenance department for any changes from normal readings.  Again, this will allow us to catch problems when they are still small.

Now to the other aspect of why turbine airplanes may be viewed as safer than piston airplanes, training and procedures.   There are no full motion simulators for piston powered twin airplanes, but there are several training centers that use visual simulators that replicate the cockpit and systems of the acutal aircraft, just like the full motion simulators do.  At ABA we integrate simulators into our training program. Since the simulators are not full motion, the FAA will not approve them for our flight training instead of using the actual airplane, so we use them in addition to actual inflight training.   With the simulators (we use both a personal computer based simulator with generic airplanes, and actual aircraft simulators) we can perform maneuvers and train for failures that would either be dangerous or impossible in the real airplane.  We believe our pilots recieve a better training program by using the simulators in addition to training in the real airplane and the insurance company agrees, as they give us a discount on our premiums!

So in summary,  If you  travel by aircraft charter and need to do so with a smaller budget, consider chartering a cabin class light twin, but ask some question first.  Just like the operators flying turbine equipment, there is a wide range of professionalism between operators, but at the Piston twin level, the differences are more important.

When considering a piston twin, ask the following:

Do you use simulators or PC flight training devices in your training program?

Do you have minimum airplane performance requirements? such as ” accelerate stop” distance calculations, minimum single engine climb rates?

Do you have procedures in place for minimum landing distances (ABA uses large aircraft minimums)?

For pilots new to the airplane do you require higher weather minimums (also borrowed from jet operators by ABA)?

Do you use engine oil analysis and engine trend monitoring programs?

Do you fly IFR or VFR? (ABA files an IFR flight plan for all passenger flights regardless of the weather, ensuring we always have Air Traffic control monitoring our flight)?

The cost of chartering a private airplane depends on how you calculate the cost.  When you charter an executive aircraft, you are renting the whole airplane and pilot.  In effect, you become the owner of that airplane for the time you are chartering it.  There are several way to look at the cost, one is just to devide the number of passengers by the cost of the charter, ie. For our Navajo Chieftain, a flight from Detroit to Chicago Midway airport with 5 hours of wait time would be about $2600.000 round trip with taxes.  that would be $433 per person based on six people.  The airlines would charge about $300 to $600 per person plus taxes, depending on the travel times.  So it might be a little more expensive, depending on the deal the airline might be running at the time,  but you get to leave on your schedule, go to a show, and return that night.  Most airline flights do not run after a late show, so you would have hotel costs.  You also get much better service, an arrive at a more comfortable private terminal.

The other way to look at the price of aircraft charter is on the value of your time.   For example, a salesman who travels to sales calls can usually make several calls a day as opposed to usually one with an airline flight.  In addition, you might be able to send him out to meet a customer in the morning and have him back in the office after lunch to get some work finished.  You not only made his life easier by shortening his day, he is more productive and you save overnight expenses that you have on the airlines.  Most corporations that charter easily justify the cost by the times savings and customer support you offer the client by being able to rapidly respond to his needs.

Depending on your situation,  Chartering an airplane can actually save your company money and time over the airlines.  For personal travel,  Chartering may not be cheaper than the airlines but is well within the means of a small group to afford.  Imagine leaving for Chicago after work, seeing a play downtown and being back home at night to tuck the kids in!  Maybe not something you would do every week, but what a treat to yourself and family!