If private aviation is good for corporate bosses, flying your own company's plane is even better: CEOs and company owners who double as pilots cite flexibility, control and even cost-efficiency as benefits.
But that doesn't mean the decision to buy and operate your own planes is entirely beneficial for the chief pilots who do it. “You have to know that when you're flying an airplane, you're actually engaged in your job, so you can't afford to sit down and check your email like some CEOs might when they're flying,” says Tom Paquin, a pilot and CEO of Victory Base, a Dallas-Fort Worth-based housing company for military families. “It can be a distraction in some ways, if you're trying to be effective on the plane itself.”
Virtually every aviation chief executive has a personal calculation about whether it makes sense for him to fly commercially or on another private plane. Chief executives who operate in the Midwest are the ones who are most keen to fly their own planes. There are about 20,000 airfields in the United States, most of which are not in major cities. Keeping his own plane at a small suburban airport can be especially helpful if the CEO's destination is another remote location or a major city that is not well served by commercial airlines.
Brad Pierce's situation makes him the perfect fit to pilot the four-year-old neon green Cirrus SR22 he purchased in 2021. He's the CEO of Restaurant Equipment World, a third-generation family-owned company that builds restaurant kitchens and focuses on the military base market. That means Pierce frequently has to travel to remote locations across the U.S., often with only small airports.
“I recently completed two transcontinental flights between Orlando and South Dakota, visiting 22 cities in 14 states in 12 days with numerous stops, events and clients,” said Pierce, who began flying in college and once had a plane make an emergency landing on Interstate 90 in New Orleans. “Flying four states in one day is a regular occurrence for me. It's just part of my daily life.”
Flying his Cirrus at a cruising speed of about 200 mph has helped Pierce achieve success in a variety of business endeavors. “I was in Chicago one day, flew to Ohio to meet with a client, then flew to Colorado and made it in five minutes to dinner,” he recalls. “I traveled 500 miles that day, but it was a million-dollar event because it literally meant a million dollars for the company to stop by and take care of me. So there was no way I wasn't going to get on the plane.”
Cheyenne II owner Bob Arnott feels the same way and lives in Stowe, Vermont, just 200 miles from Boston, on the northern edge of the East Coast megacity. “If I lived in New York, I'd have to drive to Teterboro,” he says. [an airport in New Jersey]”To get on a plane, you wait an hour to get cleared, then another 45 minutes to take off,” says a former NBC News medical reporter who is now a technology consultant. “So it's already been 2 hours and 45 minutes. But in Stowe, you drive to the airport in 15 minutes, go into the hangar, and are in the air 20 minutes after you leave your house.”
Keith Lorber is a serial entrepreneur whose latest startup, Space Monkey Partners, is a marketing consultancy that positions him as the “mission controller.” He lives in southern Montana and flies around in his 21-year-old Cirrus. “I live in a very rural state, and it usually takes more than one flight to get to other parts of the country,” he says. “Plus, I have a client in Missoula, and the flight is only an hour and a half instead of a normal five-and-a-half-hour drive. I can meet with the client in the morning, spend the day, fly back, and still be home in time for dinner.”
There's a cool factor, too: “You can take a customer and his wife on a tour of the mountains in Glacier National Park,” says Lorber. “It's a way to build a relationship outside of the typical customer relationship, establish trust in a different way, and demonstrate a level of responsiveness.”
Here are some factors that airline company leaders consider when making decisions.
opportunity cost. Pierce said it costs about $600 an hour to fly a $1 million plane, including hangar rental and insurance. “But I have to fly,” he said. “The income I get from flying is the most affordable asset in my toolbox.”
Although flying a private jet costs more than the cheapest business-travel option, paying for an economy seat on a commercial airline, flight directors are taking a holistic approach to calculating costs. “The cost savings are that there are no hotels at either end of the visit, and the operating costs of Cheyenne are pretty low,” said Arnott, who often flies the Cheyenne up the East Coast for work.
Jeremy Boehler, chief financial officer at Sargent Foods, has a rule of thumb: if he can cut travel time by more than two-thirds by piloting his Cirrus SR22 on business trips from the packaged cheese company's headquarters in Plymouth, Wisconsin, about 50 miles north of Milwaukee, it's worth it. If his destination is Indianapolis, where relatives also live, Boehler travels in the single-engine, four-seater plane. A road trip would take about 5 1/2 hours, but with the joystick at his disposal, he can be in Indy in just 1 1/2 hours.
“Commercial flights take longer because there are no direct flights,” Boehler said. “I’m the only one who has access to the hangar in Sheboygan. [Wisconsin] The airport. You check the plane the night before, do a quick pre-flight check in the morning, and off you go.”
A matter of control. David McNeil loves having “access to the corporate jet in a crisis.” The WeatherTech founder and CEO can fly any of the Bolingbrook, Illinois-based company's two jets and four helicopters.
The need for concentration. “If you're flying business, you have to enjoy it. Being a pilot means more work,” Paquin says. “When you actually get to fly the plane, your stress level goes up. You have to check the weather, [airport] Being a pilot comes with landing approaches and all sorts of other stressors, and you don’t do it every day.”
Boehler said that when he is flying, “you are focused on flying, planning and communicating with air traffic control.” But flying is “a combination of discipline, up-to-date information and… [mastering] The processes for continuing to fly safely and legally also apply in the professional world.”
Altruistic flight. Many aviation industry leaders like the fact that they have the means and the piloting skills to perform important acts of altruism: Robert Arkin, CEO of the Arkin Group, a construction company based in Miami Beach, Florida, for example, personally flew a six-seater Cherokee Six loaded with relief supplies to the Bahamas and back over 54 hours in 2019 to help islanders affected by Hurricane Dorian.
Pierce frequently flies disaster relief flights after hurricanes in the southeastern U.S. and the Caribbean. “I'm one of the first on the ground,” he said. “My staff knows that when a hurricane comes, I'm not going to be around.”
Stormy weather. “It's not worth risking your life for a customer,” Pierce says, but stresses, “with my level of experience, it's almost never the case that weather will stop me. I will only cancel if the airline cancels.”
Pilot sensibilities often clash with business imperatives. “If you have the go/no-fly power as a captain, and there are financial implications to not being able to fly from one place to another, you may not be in the best position to make decisions about the weather, the aircraft, or your qualifications as a pilot,” says Randy Liep, a former Delta pilot and active pilot who owns a Jacksonville, Fla.-based law firm and still flies F-15s as part of the Florida Air National Guard. “It's not just JFK Jr., lots of experienced, sophisticated pilots make that mistake.” Indeed, on July 16, 1999, Arnott was able to land a Cheyenne on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, during a storm. Shortly before, John F. Kennedy Jr. was flying a Piper Saratoga from a New Jersey airport to nearby Martha's Vineyard, but tragically, the Piper Saratoga crashed, carrying Kennedy, his wife, and his sister-in-law.
Arnott served as a reporter in Iraq in F-15s and F-16s with the U.S. Army helicopter regiment, but his closest encounter with disaster was piloting his own plane. “We had a full-on training session, flying over Lake Michigan to an airport at Iron Mountain, Michigan,” he said. “But the training was so good that I didn't even get my heart rate up.”
For disaster preparedness, some airmen prefer Cirrus planes, which have an integrated parachute that allows them to land safely in many emergencies. The Duluth, Minnesota-built plane was invented 40 years ago by Dale and Alan Klapmeyer after surviving a mid-air collision.
Will your subordinates come with you? One of the attractions of flying for a CEO is that he can bring colleagues along, saving money and increasing “together time.” Restaurant Equipment World's production managers and installers, for example, often ride along on Pierce's five-seater plane.
But some people are hesitant to do so from a basic risk-management perspective: “If I travel for work, I travel alone,” says Boehler.
Dan Mueller, founder of Advanced Research Corp. in Orion Township, Michigan, was a frequent flyer in a Twin Cherokee flown by his boss, the late William Sharpe Jr. Mueller was an engineering manager, and Sharpe “had no qualms about bringing the software development manager on board as well. If the plane had crashed, the company would have been closed the next day.”
There's a “very practical side” to these decisions, says Lorber: “Making sure life insurance premiums are paid, making sure wills are up to date.”
