Private Jet Manufacturers Annoyed At Backlash, Claim Jets Are Practical
Did you know that private jets are actually quite practical? We didn't. The Wall Street Journal says that private jet manufacturers are angry at the backlash against private jets and are speaking out to "counter business aircraft misinformation."
From the WSJ:
In a campaign to begin Wednesday, Cessna Aircraft Co. will run an ad that says, "Pity the poor executive who blinks," and gets rid of the company jet. "One thing is certain: true visionaries will continue to fly."
...
"We think it's time the other side of the story be told, and that support be given to those businesses with the good judgment and courage to use business aviation to not only help their businesses survive the current financial crisis, but more quickly forge a path toward an economic upturn," said Jack Pelton, Cessna's chairman and CEO.
Another advertisement (shown below) reads, "Timidity didn't get you this far. Why put it in your business plan now?" (We assume that question is rhetorical.)
The backlash is hurting Cessna where it counts, the company recently laid off 4,500 workers because of the sudden drop in demand. Gulfstream Aerospace's spokesperson also defended the use of private jets.
"Do you really want a major executive to show up three hours late to a big meeting because of flight delays?" said Robert Baugniet, director of corporate communications for General Dynamics Corp.'s Gulfstream Aerospace, which makes some of the higher-end jets.
Cessna Fights Back On Private-Jet Trend [WSJ] (Thanks, Daniel!)
Cessna Launches Campaign to Counter Business Aircraft Misinformation (Press Release)
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Comments:
"Do you really want a major executive to show up three hours late to a big meeting because of flight delays?"
No, I want him or her to use video conferencing technology so that no time is wasted going to or from an airport, and no money is spent on jet fuel or overpriced hotels.
Also, I want a pony.
As someone who, among her other duties, books travel for high-level executives at a large company?
It's a major pain in the ass. Commercial aviation has tremendous delays and poor service, as any Consumerist reader knows. The company where I work is not urgent-deadline driven enough to need a private jet, and we have a pretty robust remote-meetings system in place, but I can see where the savings in time and increased reliability would be a big plus for certain kinds of businesses.
to all the companies that are out of tune with the common American (the ones paying the taxes for your bailout) i hope you fall on hard times just like the rest of us. never feel bad for a man with his own plane!
@Etoiles: Maybe if big execs have to suffer through it along with us peons, there'll finally be pressure to improve it.
I understand the argument, but at the same time I don't have much patience for people who think they're too important to stand in line with the rest of us.
They are practical especially for companies that have to go to/from places where there is not a lot of air service and/or they have to make try and make connections. There can be ti
Oh bosh. There are layoffs everywhere these days.
Get over it, Cessna. I'll buy a jet when I make my first kazillion.
"Do you really want a major executive to show up three hours late to a big meeting because of flight delays?"
Of course, a major part of being the head executive is having the foresight to book a flight into your destination the night before/early morning of and making arrangements to get to the big meeting in a timely manner.
I want to be a true visionary too!!!!
@Clevelander: Yes, just like the rest of us poor slobs.
It is just indicitive of the upper management that don't have a clue what the rest of us suffer through.
If you have access to a coporate jet than you are in a world that most Americans just can't understand. You have enjoyed a level of luxury that we will never know. Americans are tired of watching the elite live so disproportionately better than the common American. There is isn't anything necessarily wrong with some people living better than others in a capitalist system, but there is a tipping point where the difference becomes so great that the people will no longer put up with it. We have reached that point. CEOs and executives have a moral obligation to ensure the people under them are fairly compensated BEFORE accepting their lavish pay and perks. This is leadership! What we have are managers in America. Leaders have disappeared......
@Trey Mahaffey: Funny I don't hear the whining about the jets used by politicians (either owned or leased). Surely you can't think a politician's job (which is nothing more than to put this nation further into debt) is more important than a CEO of any business that actually adds to the GDP
@Etoiles: Exactly, a large business with good profit margins shouldn't feel bad about spending a little extra on a private jet, if the reduced time and complexity is a benefit to them.
It's really only a problem if the CEO is using it as another personal perk, or if the company is hemorrhaging money.
Buy plane = more quickly forge a path toward an economic upturn.
??????
@nighttrain2007: Many politicians do fly commercially. The ones who don't often have special security needs. It's hard to imagine putting the President of the United States on a commercial flight, for example, even in first class.
@David Brodbeck: Exactly. Tremendous delays and poor service? Welcome to the "real world." I'm not 100% against private jets, but I am against them when it can save a company millions of dollars when they're asking for bailouts.
The copy feels like it was written by a douchebag I used to work for years ago. He always wrote in the same style and liked using big words.
Do you really want a major executive to show up three hours late to a big meeting because of flight delays?
Get to the airport 3 hours earlier then like the rest of us have too.
@adamczar: Right. If the company is profitable and they want a jet, that's between them and their shareholders. But if they're taking taxpayer money they shouldn't be spending millions on a winged limo so their CEO doesn't have to mingle with the commoners every time he flies to his favorite golf resort.
Ah yes, private jets MUST be totally impractical due to their price. The fact of the matter is that for many companies, they provide services that are totally unavailable from airline companies. Say you're an oil company and you need to fly 10 engineers from your Headquarters in San Francisco to coast of India, then say, the coast of Iceland and then Alaska for drill expeditions. The airlines sure as heck aren't going to all those places on the routes you need and timescale you need. Or, perhaps you're a government and you need it for secure executive VIP transport, going to and from obscure places at obscure times. The largest operators of big-time private jets are the US Air Force and Israeli Air Force.
Are they hellaciously expensive to maintain just besides the acquisition cost? Absolutely. And they're probably totally impractical for most private users, but for a lot of purposes, these jets complete missions that cannot be done any other way.
Les Grossman: "You paying attention? I'm talking... G5, Pecker! That's how you can roll. No more frequent flyer bitch miles for my boy! Oh yeah! Playa... playa! Big dick playa!"
Wait, wait, ...wait...
Slow down....
I though cessna makes those rickety wooden shacks people die in, not lear jets....
Three hours late for a meeting?
On top of the video meeting technology already mentioned, how about flying commercial the night before? Commercial + hotel is a whole lot less than private jet
The risk of being three hours late for a meeting has never stopped executives from telling all the other employees who travel to fly commercial. I bet if lower employees were flying private, executives would quickly justify the move to commercial as financial sense.
@larrymac808: THIS. Failing the use of tech to make physical travel obsolete for the usually useless meetings that corporations seem to suckle on like mother's milk, heck yes he or she can be three hours late because of flight delays. The world keeps spinning, and everyone can deal.
Because we're in a recession, no matter how much they want us to keep funding "bailouts" so they can keep the status quo that got them in this mess in the first place.
@nighttrain2007: Come to Illinois, you can still listen to us whine about Blagojevich's ridiculous expenditures of taxpayer dollars on flying back and forth to Chicago on a state-owned jet because he was too damn good to live in Springfield (the state capital). Citizens were downright VICIOUS about it, with excellent reason.
(June 22, 2007: "Gov. Rod Blagojevich's practice of flying from his Chicago home to the Capitol in Springfield and back for daily budget negotiations is costing Illinois taxpayers more than $5,800 a day - roughly $76,000 since late May and climbing." [www.cbsnews.com] )
Illinoisans are pretty understanding about legislators who go back and forth frequently to their home constituencies, even those who hire a driver so they can work on the longer drives. (Legislators do get a travel stipend, and make up the difference if they spend too much on routine travel.) And flying to, say, the national meeting of state governors in Denver on a private jet, fine, that's fairly reasonable. But refusing to live in the state capital and flying daily back and forth? FUCK YOU, MAN.
All that, and he still spend $480,000 on signs proclaiming his awesomeness on the Tollway he's too good to drive on.
He's all impeached and gone and I'm still pissed about his useless flying.
I have a better idea:
"Life used to be sweet, huh? Huge bonuses as you made poor decisions, stockholders and employees who were too busy watching their equity grow to demand anything, high-class whores who kept their mouths shut, and a luxurious private jet to fly you (and some of those whores) wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted.
Now you have to fight for your millions, the average man thinks HE has the right to question YOU, and the hookers are giving up their client lists faster than you can apologize to your wife.
Private Jets: Don't Stoop to their Level"
@jmndos: Cessna's primary business has been business jets for decades now. They stopped making light planes in the 1980s when the bottom dropped out of that market and didn't start again until fairly recently.
There are reasons for executives to use private jets, specifically that they can fly direct and then get work done in transit. Especially helpful if they're going from New York to some podunk oil field in west Texas, for example.
And on top of that, companies that have private jets more than likely already spend quite a bit of money on commercial plane tickets anyway.
I am not going to defend the use of private planes totally, but the wealthy in this country do create a lot of jobs that are now gone. We all take for granted, have you looked at the yacht building business, resort homes, high end tourism, cars, and other things most of us will only dream of. We are starting to sound more and more like the Russians who revolted in 1909 and ushered in Lenin. We all want to make the same thing and have the same stuff. Have you all looked at how well that works in our education system. The best teacher in the country makes the exact same as the dip shit down the hall.
All this class envy and attack always overlooks entertainers, sports stars, etc. I don't see them giving up their private jets, or the peasantry marching on their houses with pitch forks.
I remember thinking this private aviation trend had gotten out of hand when a local church got a permit to build a helipad for their pastor. The amount of decadence in our society is pretty damn astounding.
@Ash78: exactly right... since most of the parts manufacturing of these planes are subcontracted out to companies like Vought Aircraft.... that's where the manufacturing layoffs will occur.
@Ash78: Eh? Jets are actually a pretty big part of our business - our single engine craft have been slipping for a while now.
@Oranges w/ Cheese: Skype videophone is cheap, and it's easy to output to a bigger screen if you like. However, my understanding is that there's a considerable psychological difference between telepresence and real presence that radically changes the dynamics of a meeting. I don't think that should rule it out as a possibility, but I can understand why businesses are reluctant to entrust crucial meetings to a medium that may not work in the expected ways.
@Oranges w/ Cheese: Yup. They cost the same as a Macbook or Macbook Pro - because they come with it built in.
$2 million for a jet?
A couple hundred thousand for video conferencing technology?
Hmmm....
@Oranges w/ Cheese: You do realize exactly HOW MUCH jet fuel costs, right? Hangar rental? Pilot on retainer? Flight crew?
@Oranges w/ Cheese: You don't have to actually be able to see the face of the executive himself you know, just his presentation. So you just stream the powerpoint/video/whatever over the net and you use good old fashioned conference calling with a speaker phone. They actually work pretty good now days.
@larrymac808: You assume that customers are comfortable with video conferencing. A hand shake goes a long way.
Sure they deserve it. Because they're not going to take it anywhere but the meeting right? Because they're not going to make a layover in Hawaii for a week on their way to a meeting in Chicago from Maryland, Hawaii's not that far off right? They certainly wouldn't think of using it to ferry around their friends and family would they? They wouldn't have a jet for each board member would they? And they wouldn't even think of using taxpayer money for frivolous amenities such as champagne. Their sense of entitlement is justified right? They give the little people their jobs so they deserve some special treatment.
-sarcasm, better than sliced bread-
Sure. Go ahead and buy it.
But don't buy it with my tax money and don't pay for your fuel and other related charges with my tax money.
Balance your schedule better to compensate for the delays (imagine that - having to deal with stuff real people deal with) or video conference.
I don't want this ridiculous and excessive stuff paid for with MY tax money. I had to learn to get work and meeting on time - so do you. Would it be awesomely convenient if I could get beamed up every time I needed to get somewhere? Sure.
But I'm not a shareholder in your company and the world will not stop if you get to your meeting an hour (or 3 hours) late. If it was so important for you to fly there, they will wait to say what they have to say.
The backlash is hurting Cessna where it counts, the company recently laid off 4,500 workers because of the sudden drop in demand.
Bzzt. Most of those layoffs were in the general aviation sector and have nothing to do with jets, which are a relatively minimal part of Cessna's business.