I wonder if there is a way to connect with people who have private jets and wouldn't mind picking up a passenger on the way at a price? That might be able to lower the price point for private travel if people are willing to do that. This depends on whether the ones having private jets are even willing to have the hassle of random people joining their flights.
I imagine the issue you run into there is that at that point you are providing a paid service, which triggers different regulatory/insurance requirements. Just like you can't pick up paid passengers in your own private car when just driving somewhere, other than getting some money for petrol.
For charter flights things along those lines already exist. For example hopping a ride on empty leg repositioning routes.
For truly private jet flights it can be trickier. Many truly private jets operate as private flight operations under part 91 of the FAA’s rules. That has a lot less red tape for a private operator but means they truly need to be a private operator and can’t pickup others for hire.
Several startups have tried to get around the above via legal loopholes via ‘Uber for airplanes’ models and got shot down by the FAA.
People with private jets typically have them for privacy and flexibility. Taking strangers as passengers is defeating those purposes.
However for small planes (Cessna etc.) pilots have to reach their flight hours and for financing that take passengers. Sometimes just for scenic round-trips. Sometimes over longer distances. Examples for sites arranging this (German examples) are
https://flyt.club/https://www.mitflugzentrale.de/ or international https://www.wingly.io/
What I see happening here (Switzerland) is that pilots, who have issues reaching their mandatory minimum flying hours, are flexible and willing to take on passengers for cost price.
That's not really Uber for planes, but it gets you places in a way that is often much more expensive otherwise.
This is rarely worth it. There are multiple companies that have tried this and it really comes down to you either being able to afford private jet travel or not.
If you can't, you'll find that you're really just buying into hype more than actual productive travel. All of the arrangements will have strict conditions on passengers, luggage, arrival/departure times and many trips will only be 1-way so you're left finding your own way back, and that might be from small regional airport somewhere.
You can gain alot of time simply by getting your private pilot and instrument rating and buying a fast airplane. It need not be a Cirrus, for example. A well maintained 60s era Bonanza can get you halfway across the country in a few hours. Sure it's more expensive, but you can fly to an airport that is nearest to your business dealings, often borrow a "crew car" from the FBO in exchange for buying gas, and be home in time for dinner.
Yes. Though he only had 50 hours total time, and that plane - a relatively high speed, retractable, turbocharged piston - is way too much to handle for someone with only 50 hours.
From accounts, it sounds like he stalled the plane on climbout. He claims his girlfriend leaned on the controls, which doesn't make a lot of sense, because leaning on the yoke would push the nose down, preventing a stall. Who knows what actually happened.
But yes, a novice pilot with a fast, sophisticated plane is asking for trouble.
True, but is it worth it. Private pilots are enough of an additional risk that life insurance will charge extra if you are one. Commercial planes are safer than driving, but flying yourself it apparently not (of course this depends on lots of factors, practice and training being big ones).
Besides, if you can afford a plane for trips like this the cost of hiring a pilot to fly your plane is in the noise and well worth is just so you can get something done.
“Private pilots are enough of an additional risk that life insurance will charge extra if you are one.”
That’s often not true. They do ask and you have to provide records but it doesn’t necessarily impact rates. Pilots are generally wealthier, better educated and need to undergo regular medical exams to keep their certificate. All things that statistically make one healthier. There are many aspects that make a pilot a more attractive life insurance candidate from a risk standpoint, not less.
It has always cost me about 3 times more to get a policy that does not exclude small airplanes.
I can get a nice cheap policy as a pilot with the small airplane exclusion though, but since piloting the small aircraft is one of the more dangerous things I do, seems like not a good idea to exclude it.
Cover the crash risk with appropriate aircraft insurance and you don’t need to cover it with expensive life insurance. This was my agent’s advice anyhow.
Single pilot IFR near minimums is scarier than BASE jumping, I've done both, it's very dangerous in piston singles, large commercial is orders of magnitudes safer with turbines, modern electronics, and two pilots sharing the workload...
I bet there are a bunch of us... I'm not sure knowing more jumpers going in than pilots is quite valid, jumpers, especially BASE, tend to be more "cowboy" than the average IFR pilot, jump at bridge day and meet your peers.. ;-)
I have family that are MD's and it's very common (or was) for doctors to get their pilot's license. I was told about death pools are common for new pilots, with surgeons being seen as the more likely to die due to their less risk adverse nature.
Sorry, my phrasing is a bit funny :) A surgeon is considered more likely to take risks in treatment vs a general practitioner. A surgeon is also more likely to die in a small plane crash.
A cool conversion is a Piper Malibu with a propjet. As far as I understand, the bodywork can handle speeds quite a bit faster than the stock model.
Edit: If you buy one of the piston versions second hand. I just checked Wikipedia and it seems like Piper realised what I said above at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-46 (and charge accordingly).
I’m not sure you actually save as much time as you might think if you are flying yourself when you factor in flight planning, pre-flight inspections, etc.
Definitely airport pairs where this could be a huge time savings though.
I’ve been flying piston airplanes for 20 years, mostly for recreation/personal travel but with a couple business trips a year mixed in.
There is no way in hell that aviation has “saved me time” overall. It does save me time on the day of a trip when everything goes perfectly, but there are many winter days in New England that are flyable by twin jets that are not flyable even in de-iced piston singles. You just don’t have the power surplus or airspeed to plan to climb through a moderate layer of icing.
If you lived on an island and commutes to the mainland near a satellite airport is one scenario where you could save time overall. Otherwise, it’s a time-consuming (and very fun) pastime.
I just want to emphasize that getting instrument-rated is not a trivial endeavor and it's not likely something to be achieved by someone whose interest is entirely in getting to their meetings more efficiently. And without the instrument rating, your travel plans will be instantly foiled the moment there's bad weather. If you have a passion for aviation and flight, an instrument rating is certainly within reach. But otherwise getting it will feel like quite a slog.
An an aside, if you're an executive, flying private with your team (all as passengers) makes it easy to continue to work on the flight and prepare for the upcoming meeting. If you're busy piloting the plane, it becomes much harder if not impossible to be a part of that.
As someone with an instrument rating even having that can be foiled. I am sitting in Scottsdale when I should have been home last night because of icing.
I routinely fly through clouds but don't fuck with ice :)
It took my wife and I about three months to do our instrument ratings where that was pretty much our solid focus. It felt like a bit of a slog at the end, but pretty rewarding.
I got iced up in winter at night years ago and learned my lesson. TKS/FIKI is a great safety add on (if you can get it) to give you an extra advantage of you get caught up in it, but it's not a license to plow around in known ice.
It's not a fantastic idea for safety reasons. A couple of factors are going to add to the already elevated risk levels of GA flight in piston aircraft.
1. You, an exec, are going to want to see an ROI on the substantial time and money commitment you made in getting instrument rated. So you're going to want to use that aircraft as much as possible. Back when you flew commercial, you'd sit in the back of a 737 debriefing yourself after a brutal meeting with a gin and tonic and some angry emails to your minions. Now you've gone straight from having your ear burned off by a furious client to negotiating complex clearances in the clouds.
2. Get-there-itis kills. And now you have a plane, so, sure you can make that widget sales meeting in Spokane and be back in time for your kid's game... But the weather is closing in. You sold your spouse on the idea of a private aircraft just for situations like this, so you could be present for family and grow the business. Oh, but the client is on the fence, so maybe you need to stick around for a bit and admire their factory. Hey, no takeoff time right? Now it really is time to go. Ceilings are low, there's ice, a storm en-route, it's all a bit marginal. But you don't want to miss junior's first pitch so off you go into the murk and a couple hours later some volunteer firefighters from a town you've never heard of are shoveling what's left of you into black sacks while trying not to vomit.
All of which is to say, it's a brilliant idea as long as your travel area enjoys VFR conditions most of the time. Now your instrument rating is a buttress for your safety, instead of an excuse to extend your limits.
In my opinion, this is one of the more important things to member.
In my life, it explains why I ran out of gas tying to get to a meeting and why I didn't backup $busy_executive Outlook PST file before doing a "repair".
Your second point is the basis for an entire chapter of the fantastic book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.
The author goes through a bunch of case studies of people in survival situations, some who made it, others who didn't. The ones who didn't generally did something that seems pretty stupid at first glance. He gets into some neuroscience and you realize how easy it would be to make the same mistake.
It's also exactly what happened to John F. Kennedy Jr., though not entirely his own fault (he wasn't going to do it until his wife and sister-in-law pressured him to).
There's surely some interesting psychology at work with get-there-itis. I would be very interested to read about it.
To my mind the pilot is weighing a few possible future outcomes:
- satisfying some obligation by completing the journey, getting pats on the back or avoiding further trouble.
- disappointing or angering stakeholders (clients, wives and sisters-in-law, children) by cancelling a journey due to prudence, and then, potentially, further feeling that one will be perceived as inadequately skilled at something which is a prominent part of one's self-identity.
- taking off anyway and maybe having to make an emergency landing en route, thus demonstrating eagerness to complete the journey and a heroic, skillful handling of a dangerous situation.
- dying in a fiery crash.
Even outcome three ends up being positive for the pilot. They get all the social credit for having attempted the journey, plus an unimpeachable excuse for failing to complete it. Dying in a crash is just a hard thing to imagine, so maybe features far less in the flight decision emotional risk balancing than it should.
One of the vanishingly few safety things which the scuba diving community does perhaps better than aviation is the idea that "any diver may thumb [abort] a dive for any reason at any time," and that is fully expected to include just 'feeling bad.' It is an integral part of the buddy system which doesn't have an analog in aviation, but maybe there could be a mental preflight checklist which could be used to identify situations where GtI is a factor and thus give the pilot a basis for staying on the ground when their gut is saying, "don't take off!"
>On Monday, the New York Post reported that Kennedy had been reluctant to fly into Martha's Vineyard in the first place, but had been pressured to do so by his wife, Carolyn. Kennedy reportedly told C. David Heymann, the author of "A Woman Called Jackie," whom he was recruiting to write for George, that "I don't even want to go to Martha's Vineyard. I'm flying my own plane ... Unfortunately, I have to take my sister-in-law with us. She's going to Martha's Vineyard. My wife insists I take her there.
Visual flight rules aviation is far more prone to weather delays than any other mode of travel. You can walk in a rainstorm or drive in a blizzard if you really want to, but it's straight up illegal to fly in conditions below certain visibility thresholds.
The insurance policy for on-the-job injuries where I work prevents you from flying GA for business travel (or from putting more than X employees on the same commercial flight)
Appreciate the point, but that's a lot of work to even consider (my wife has her instrument and commercial tickets). Combine that weather, and you see why the AOPA's GC (or was it head lobbyist?) flies commercial when he needs to be somewhere.
I've been flying small rec aircraft since ~2000 and fly commercial out of Dulles weekly, and I don't concur at all that there is a time savings over GA.
Depending on the airport and your timing, if you have TSA Precheck + Clear, no checked bag and a scheduled car service, you can get dropped off, through security and onto a United/Delta with basically no waiting.
Speaking from experience of owning two different planes and finally switching back to renting, ownership is a time sink.
The mandatory annual grounds your plane for at least a few weeks, and that's the best case scenario where your plane does not have significant ADs or issues. Aircraft maintenance shops are very busy (have been for a couple years due to mandatory ADS-B upgrades and are still working through those backlogs) and therefore expensive.
Finding a good and honest aircraft mechanic is also a dilemma, and you're kinda geographically bound in your search. Hasn't happened to me (I hope), but if you flip through the pages of "Plane and Pilot" or "Flying", it's full with the stories of "mechanic suggested a $20,000 engine overhaul, I spent the next two weeks researching the issue on my own, called multiple friends of mine and it turned out I just needed to replace a $300 part".
Airplane ownership favors those mechanically inclined. There are like hundreds of random things that could seem merely suspicious during the pre-flight inspection, but turn out to be a major problem when dug deeper. People who have done flying professionally (airline pilots, airforce) and mechanics seem to have an edge on this.
> "mechanic suggested a $20,000 engine overhaul, I spent the next two weeks researching the issue on my own, called multiple friends of mine and it turned out I just needed to replace a $300 part"
Do you think the equivalent in the web industry is a someone stating an entire app needs an overhaul, "because PHP" when maybe it is a simple bug fix?
Us engineer minded folks are quick to want to re-engineer things.
The mechanic doesn't want to re-engineer anything, they want to make money. It's quite a bit less tinkering for an A&P to drop in a new engine than it is to replace an interior part that may require tearing part of the engine down. Even a $300 part would pretty quickly become a high 4-figure bill if you're paying a mechanic or two $150+/hr to tear down your engine to replace it, then rebuild it, then test fly it.
Similarly, I bet the mechanic is going to be held to their work and dropping in a new engine shifts the responsibility to a warranty item vs. them finding there is more work needed after digging in and replacing a part.
I’ve had that happen when I was an auto mechanic. Car comes in with symptoms of leaking valves/seals/guides. “We can put a new head on it, but now that the top end is nice and tight, it very well might blow the old, weak-ass piston rings. Recommend a rebuilt.” Put a new head on it, sho’ enough, car comes back two weeks later blowing smoke from the rings.
The $300 part fixes your problem today, the rebuilt engine fixes the reliability problem you might still have after the $300 quick-fix.
How much time have you spent in engine bays? What do you know about tolerances i jet engines. You aren't qualified and will likely never be qualified to be your own jet mechanic, let alone your own aero engineer.
Crossing into personal attack isn't ok here. If you keep breaking the site guidelines and failing to use HN as intended, we're going to have to ban you. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this if you want to keep posting here.
I am an engineer this was not a personal attack. Most people are not qualified and will never be rated to work on their own aircraft, in the same way they are not qualified to structurally engineer their homes or similar. Aircraft are not software projects and it's not really about php vs bugfixing.
Please identify which part of the post was a personal attack so I can fix it to your satisfaction
Your comment was almost entirely about the other person. You said "you" or "your" five times. Combining that with critical language and a prosecutorial style makes for personal attack, even if you didn't think that was what you were doing.
How to fix it: don't mix personal language with sharp criticism, and don't use a prosecutorial style. We want curious conversation here, not cross examination. The guidelines cover all this and more: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It sounds like you know a lot in this field. The very best thing to do in that case is not to go on about others' ignorance (demonstrated or assumed)—it's rather to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn.
I think this is a very bad idea safety-wise. Aviation with small planes has a lot of risks and the one thing you should not do is trying to reach a certain destination under pressure. Just in the last weeks there have been several crashes in the US, some covered by the media. Main reason was bad weather, but people decided that they should fly nevertheless. Meanwhile, commercial passenger aviation had like 1 casualty in 10 years in the US. Not only are the machines larger and better equipped, they are completely cared for and handled by professionals. While there is some pressure to stick to schedules etc., professional pilots without any direct pressure to land at a certain airport at all costs tend to decide more rational.
Even with car driving, haste to reach a destination is a bad advisor and often leads to accidents. Planning with ample time buffers is also increasing safety there.
>I think this is a very bad idea safety-wise. Aviation with small planes has a lot of risks .... Just in the last weeks there have been several crashes in the US, some covered by the media.
A lot of famous people have been killed in small-plane crashes. If we could go back in time and keep musicians from flying on private planes, just imagine how different music might be now: Buddy Holly, Randy Rhodes, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Lynyrd Skynyrd (band members), Rickey Nelson, Ritchie Valens, just to name a few.
Getting a pilot’s license and owning a plane is not a time savings unless you are willing to spend a lot on services and a really nice (ice certified) plane. There is a long list of things that a pilot needs to spend their time on to become and stay one. “Time to spare? Go by air.”
What they write is something weird. I did a website for a man who does luxury yacht rentals in China as a side project. He was somewhat close to that industry.
I heard that very few people, even billionaires really own their jets. Leasing, rent, "uber," and club memberships are way more common.
Second, you do not save time flying a private jet. He said he knew a number of CEOs who had more than enough money for a charter, but often had to fly economy class because it's the only ticket you can realistically buy same day on a minute notice. One said that arranging a private flight usually takes a week or more, and you have to be shuttled from a small, remote airport, adding hours to the trip.
I can myself confirm the later as I once met Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in an economy class!
The later really tells that private charter doesn't really work anywhere but parts of US and Europe, and more being more of a shuttle service than real point to point transport.
It must depend. If you live close to the airport where your jet is, and you can fly above the corridors (13000 feet?), it must work. I worked at a "startup-ish" company which got their own jet, they sometimes took staff for a quick weekend trip to somewhere in the sun.
The fuel burn on any turbine down low is eye-watering. Jets almost always fly far higher than the low arrival corridors. It’s problematic for some that are temporarily restricted from RVSM airspace (so are pinned down to 28K feet or lower). Even on a 45 minute hop, the jet will climb into the 20s.
The “small remote airport” is often closer to the eventual destination/origin. Charters/private operator can and do, for the most part, use any airport (at least in the US) so any decision to use a satellite airport is driven by convenience or fees. Most charter buyers are fee insensitive (what’s another $500 ramp fee on a $12K flight?) and convenience/time sensitive.
It depends entirely on where you need to go. If you want to go from London to New York, you take a normal flight because there are plenty of those already. If you need to go to the middle of nowhere, I guess having your own plane is really useful, because there might not be a regular flight going there when you need to.
Yes. The only obvious ones where that isn't true I can think of are the need to go to Teterboro or Northolt instead of JFK/LaGuardia or Heathrow. But neither of those is particularly less convenient than the commercial alternative, just that they're still a long distance from the relevant commercial centres.
> you have to be shuttled from a small, remote airport
Busy airports usually do not like private flights. But well, not all large airports are busy; and not all small airports are remote (it's usually the other way around).
> Busy airports usually do not like private flights.
Citation (no pun intended) needed.
I fly my T206 into Las Vegas, Houston IAH, Phoenix, and other busy airports all the time and those airports are perfectly welcoming, assuming you know what you are doing
I think less than average. HN would, in my best guess, be much wealthier than average, but contain a smaller proportion of the super wealth required to (reasonable) purchase a private jet
I would say the percentage on HN is far far higher.
The majority of HN are from the US/the anglosphere/wealthy western nations. A large percentage of HN are in a profession that pays above average (engineering). A smaller but I guess not insignificant percentage are investors. HN is in no way representative of the general population.
I'm sure there are far fewer people on HN at the lower end of the global wealth scale, than in the global population.
But it takes a lot of money to buy a jet. I would not be too sure that the very top of the global wealth scale is well-represented here, either. Dicking around on a web forum seems like a waste of time for someone with the means to live the life they want.
>I would say the percentage on HN is far far higher.
>A large percentage of HN are in a profession that pays above average (engineering)
Not related. Even if you're a director at Google pulling 1m a year in, you're not buying a private jet. Or, you're not unless you're reckless.
The reason HN would have a far higher audience of people who own or have access to private jets is because a bunch of tech entrepreneurs who've really made it, such as the Collisons and Drew Houston, have come through here on their ascension and some of whom are still around.
You can buy an airworthy legacy Citation 500/501 for $200K with a few hundred hours left on the turbines. It’s not the purchase price that gets you; it’s the operating costs. Fuel burns of 150+ gallons per hour at only 350mph cruise and regular five/low-six figure inspection/repair bills are what really puts a crimp in the plans.
Figure $50K year in year out for maint and an occasional $100K bad surprise. $25K for insurance and training. $25K for rural hangar and some multiple of that for big city hangar.
Figure $2/mile for fuel on a long trip, $3/mi on a shorter hop. Jet-A ranges from $2.75/gal to $5/gal typically (with some outlier airports being higher). Fuel is heavy and hurts performance, so it’s rare to tanker significant quantities of “cheap” fuel.
Those figures are roughly right for a legacy Citation with JT15s. Bigger jets might be more. Newer jets might be more fuel efficient (and correspondingly more expensive to buy). A legacy Citation is a 50-150 hour/yr airplane. Fly it much more than that and you'd be better off in a newer Citation with the FJ44s (more expensive engines, much better fuel specifics).
One of my buddies transitioned from a turboprop to a lear. He would burn more fuel on the ground than we would would in a piston powered 182 for the entire trip. I think his burn rate was near 75gal/hour in the Cheyenne compared to our 12gal/hour or so. Figure $400/hour in fuel depending on what jet-a cost these days. Mind you, he went much faster/higher than what our bug smasher can do... you pay for that speed in fuel. For us, the next jump up to an old piston that could do 200kts/hour would likely burn 14-18gal/hour with a single engine.
Looking at our FBO here, Jet-A is ~$5.80/gal and 100LL is ~$5.50/gal
The chance of me buying (or even flying on) a private jet is very small indeed. I still found the article a good bit of well-researched journalism and very interesting.
What’s funny is that if time is really the motivator, there are so many more cost efficient ways of gaining time then corporate aviation. And most of the people who use corporate aviation, haven’t optimized their time in other parts of their lives E.g. have a personal trainer come to your house everyday (as opposed to going to the gym), get a personal chef to cook your meals, move closer to work (or have work move closer to you),etc.
Definitely - 95% of the people I know who fly private don’t have chauffeurs (for example) - which would be a much greater time savings over the course of the year.
I think it just shows that either a. The time argument is a rationalization or b. It’s socially more acceptable to spend money largely out of sight on corporate aviation, rather than having people in your everyday life see an enormous household staff
I wouldn't put having a chauffeur in the same category as flying private. Sure, having someone else drive you around allows you to make phone calls, check email in the back seat. But flying private allows you to set your schedule and not wait around for the next flight out.
There is a video (and I believe it's linked in this thread) about a Walmart exec visiting stores across the country. It's likely in some small to medium sized town with a regional airport. If they meet with the team from 9-12 and the next flight out isn't until 5pm, they are wasting that time waiting. Instead they fly their plane in, meet, fly out at 12:15 and are in the next town with the next manager in 45 minutes.
That's exactly why Walmart maintains a fleet, they can fit more meetings in 1 day and also return them back home without overnight stays in multiple cities. The faster communication and responsiveness of execs to regional issues more than makes up for the cost.
Flying a charter jet is the equivalent of hiring a cab for a trip or a town car for a day. I guarantee you that 99% of people who fly private do that -- several hundred times a year.
It's just that a $500 town car for the day is more practical than having a chauffeur fly with you to Hong Kong, Bali or Cannes...
> And most of the people who use corporate aviation, haven’t optimized their time in other parts of their lives E.g. have a personal trainer come to your house everyday (as opposed to going to the gym), get a personal chef to cook your meals, move closer to work (or have work move closer to you),etc.
What makes you think this? I would have thought the bar for getting a personal trainer or a housekeeper is far far lower than the bar for people getting corporate aviation? Many middle class people manage to afford a personal trainer and housekeeper.
Personal experience - I’m talking about the mass rich people with m >$20m <$500m in the US that are the target market for fractional jet ownership. Sure they might have a personal trainer (at their gym) or a house keeper or two that does their cooking, but few have a real personal chef or a chauffeur etc.
Put another way, corporate aviation costs several thousand dollars per hour of time saved, and most people that use it have not exhausted time savings that are easier to come by
It's also possible they care more about some hours than others -- everyone needs some downtime, so hiring a professional knitter it wouldn't help at all. Whereas saving hours on the crunch day when you're chasing a deal is worth a lot more.
That said I think there's also something in the social acceptability of services being higher than that for servants.
> While the evidence for this has been mostly anecdotal, a study published in 2017 by the National Business Aviation Association, the industry’s D.C.–based advocacy group, drew a correlation between companies in the S&P 500 that deploy business aircraft versus those that don’t; the users outperformed non-users by 70 percent.
AKA the higher-performing companies could afford private jets. What is up with this spurious assumption of causation?
NetJets and ExecJets do fractional ownership--also owned by Berkshire Hathaway. They are very common and almost always hear one on frequency when I'm flying around. I've heard it described as Uber for jets.
I believe that business aviation exists mainly because commercial aviation is not trustworthy. You book a flight and most of the times it's late for whatever reason or even canceled. It's also nearly impossible to find alternative flights for the same time if yours is canceled so you have to cancel or delay your business meeting.
Delays and cancellations aren't the norm everywhere.
What is the norm worldwide is long intervals between getting into the airport and the airplane departure and between airplane arrival and one getting out of the airport. As a norm passengers waste at a minimum 2 hours before departure and 30 minutes after arrival.
It's pretty shitty in US depending on the airport. For example, I waste about an hour after arriving at O'Hare in Chicago. Since it's so big it takes a while to taxi to gate and get your bags. I haven't had that bad of an experience elsewhere in the US except maybe Dulles in Washington, DC suburbs.
There’s many more benefits. The ability to go (mostly) when you want, directly from one small local airfield to another, possibly significantly closer to your destination, a lot less security theater, a lot less waiting (waiting to board, waiting for the other passengers to board, waiting for luggage).
It all adds up to a lot more convenience and time savings, never mind how fancy first class service you get on regular commercial flights.
Especially if you’re going somewhere where’s there’s no direct flight option. Just a single connection flight will cost an hour or more.
By way of talking my own book, I would note that the experience of having a big-screen tv, surround sound, and your PS4 on the plane is nothing to sneeze at.
As someone who puts in-flight entertainment systems in private jets, the only common thing I've seen in the ownership groups is an ability to afford the price tag. There are definitely a lot of buyers who are getting into this for time gains, but there are also buyers who are simply interested in privacy, luxury, or some peace and quiet. I ended up having to troubleshoot an in-flight issue on a ~$60 million private jet and the investment in sound-proofing insulation is totally worth it.
I came across a Reddit post a while back and the user said that for whatever reason people of wealth were attracted to them. As a result, they were able to learn a lot about their lifestyles, habits, etc, on an intimate level that most of us wouldn't know. Based on the detailed information that OP provided, it wouldn't surprise me if it was true.
They said that one of the most important factors for the ultra-wealthy was time. This involved wealthy individuals:
- Hiring personal assistants (to run errands)
- Hiring personal chefs (no time wasted cooking)
- Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc)
We can't control the flow of time, but we can most certainly use it to our benefit.
Time is the ultimate luxury. I remember two separate reddit AMAs with centenarian women, who had lived from candle-lit houses and horse-drawn carriages to moon landings and the internet. When asked what was their favorite invention in their lives, both answered the washing machine. They suddenly had much more time for themselves!
Robert Caro masterfully paints the picture of what life was like in rural Texas for women making homes before their area was electrified. It wasn't just time saved. It was hard, physical labor that caused their bodies to break down that they were saved from.
Really quite hard to fathom for any of us accustomed to growing up without that burden.
I had no understanding of what that sort of life must have been like before reading the chapter, but after it stuck with me so strongly. I felt wholly inadequate trying to summarize it above.
Back then I imagine the real problem wasn't the "hardness" and physical demands of the labor, but the risk of physical injury due to poor safety controls/practices that "caused their bodies to break down."
For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days.
I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.
It seems like it was both. I have framed houses and I have shingled roofs. The former is physically demanding. The latter is back breaking.
Some excerpts from Caro:
> the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands
> the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...
My grandmother grew up on a ranch. It now is mostly family cabins, but the original cabin is still there with the original hand cranked washer. One summer we spent a month there and had to do our laundry by hand and then dry it on the line. It gave me a great appreciation for modern washers and dryers.
Back in the day I did consulting work on a personal level for an ultra-wealthy person. He was into making electronic music as a passion. This was in the days of 486/pentium, so the tools available to do this were relatively expensive. He'd create something and slip a couple of hundred to a club DJ to play it when he went out.
Anyway, he would use a floppy and throw it away. I realized he did this to save time. No need to format the disk and reuse, he would just pull another one out. He was buying time.
It infuriated a relative of mine when I told the story due to waste, but I explained to her those minutes he would spend formatting the disks wasn't spent. He came out ahead.
"Back in the day" this wasn't even a consideration. It's only been very very recently that people have started thinking about plastics breaking down and going into the water system.
Obviously it was a concern since the very first plastic item was manufactured. But who was aware this was a concern? It's only been in the last 5 years or so that I can recall hearing anything about it. And only in the last 2 years or so has it really risen to the level of concern for me. Maybe we are reading totally different sources that it has been on your radar for decades.
As a datapoint... Back in elementary school 25 years ago, they most certainly were teaching my class that plastic doesn’t decompose and how important it was to reduce waste.
As one anecdata point, I was born in 1978 and I can't remember ever not having this concern. Not sure what you mean by very recently, though--one could say plastic was even invented very recently.
My parents grew up in an environment (semi-rural) where/when it seems to have been normal to leave trash around, though. This was in the 50s. I guess they saw the issues and raised my siblings and me differently.
It makes me happy that more people are thinking about not trashing their environment!
That really is a government and market policy concern though. Expecting people to globabally adjust their profit-seeking behavior to include ecology is just wishful thinking. People simply are not able, even if well intentioned, to decide what matters and what doesn't.
Many will say that expecting the government to help is hopeless. However, that is fatalism, and an improperly functioning government doesn't negate the fact that only government can guide the market to preserve the resources of the future (including our health.)
These are not the people of the lowest class though. The privilege of earning more is given by others, so you should learn how to behave and move the society towards a better future since that future is where your wealth is going to be preserved better.
The really big time benefit to flying private is about schedule flexibility rather than security etc (though that's important too). Flying private an executive can turn up and leave 5 minutes later, and be on the road 5 minutes after landing. If a meeting overruns and there's only one commercial flight a day with the relevant city pair, then they're just out of luck. Flying private, it's not a problem.
The economics of whether to own vs rent (netjets etc) is essentially about scale.
I completely agree. If I wanted to fly down to Austin, TX for BBQ I could do so in a day, rather than fly in and fly back home based on the airline's schedule.
Austinite here... your hypothetical BBQ trip sounds exactly like the type of thing some super-rich outsider would do. Personally, I don’t buy into the hype. The BBQ is good but not “wait in line for hours” good. I’d rather smoke my own meats if it’s going to take all day.
That has a strong parallel with how I went from public transit to driving a car. Before, I had to leave at an exact time to make the train, if I didn't I'd be half an hour late. I guess private jets are the same on a long distance scale. And a few orders of magnitude in cost.
> Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc)
The problem with private jets is that they severely limit where you can travel, unless you don't care about leaving the continent. Private jets tend to be small (unless you're John Travolta), and small jets have limited range. Accordingly, they can't easily cross oceans. If all you care about is going between NY and FL or CA, then they work fine, but if you want to fly to Asia, you'll have to book a ticket on a major airline like the rest of us.
You just have to be rich enough. At this level these folks fly transatlantic without a second thought. Netjets/fractional level yeah you're scraping by at small airports but your own Gulfstream and you're at a whole new level.
A Gulfstream 5 has a range of 12,000km. For comparison, a Boeing 787-8 (one of the longest ranged commercial airliners, often used for transpacific travel) has a range of about 13,000km.
Even the smaller private jets, such as a Citation, have a range of 6,500km, which is still more than enough to go transatlantic in a single flight, or even US<->Asia in 2 hops. For comparison, a Boeing 757 (often used for smaller US<->Europe and US<->South America flights) has a range of 7,200km.
Yeah I got my dreams crushed by looking into private jets. The distance to go from BOS to HAN is ~13,000km, of which only one of the newer gulfstreams with a range of ~14,000km might be able to do. I guess that's why a lot people still fly business/first class.
One thing that I'm always amused with is for some reason or other many of these business jets can fly way higher than commercial planes. Most commercial air traffic don't fly higher than like 41,000 feet.
If you go into any flight tracker app that lets you filter air traffic by altitude, you'll find many of these business jets buzzing around up at 50,000 feet or so. Not sure what regulations (or lack of) lets them fly so much higher than normal commercial aircraft but there you have it....
Taking multiple stops to cross the Pacific is still greatly lengthening your trip, and not just because of the pit-stop. See the other response here from JCharante about flying BOS-HAN; you can't do that with a 6500km range. And you can't stop in the middle, because there's no airports near the North Pole. So you'll have to do something like stop on the west coast, then stop again in Hawaii or Guam. Your total trip will be much greater. Why bother with this when you can do it non-stop in first-class with JAL or ANA? You'll have more comfort and better service than on your Citation too.
For most intercontinental routes, you're not going to be lucky enough to have a decent airport to do a fuel stop at without taking a significant detour, which costs both fuel and time.
The price is cheaper (in thousands of dollars) if you're willing to take a smaller range jet and take a few hops. The tech stops to refuel are usually quick, unless you are landing in countries known to have stricter checks (LATAM, Africa and some parts of Asia).
It's not an "exception", it's totally normal for the huge jets that Asian airlines fly for their intercontinental routes. Sure, you don't need that much range to go from NYC-LON, but I'd argue that that's an "exception" as such a short route that happens to cross an ocean and is also popular. The Pacific is a much larger ocean. You're not going to get between any major Asian destination (China, Japan, Korea) and other major endpoints (Australia, US, Europe) non-stop with such short range, but the Asian airlines do these routes all the time.
Most airliners? I doubt it; the smaller ones like 737 are usually used for shorter routes. By numbers, I would guess the large majority of air traffic is shorter-route, and with smaller planes. Most air travelers, after all, are not traveling between places as far apart as Syndey and NYC.
But that's not the issue here; my contention way above was the private jets aren't any good for extremely long-distance intercontinental routes, and no one has disproven this assertion yet, though several have tried.
>Even with the stops, you can come out ahead in travel time and total comfort.
I seriously doubt that. I've been in corporate jets like Citations. They're really tiny inside; I can't stand up in them at all. Small jets do much worse with turbulence, and being so small inside, they just aren't going to have the amount of space available that you get with a first-class "cubicle" that you get on one of the top-tier international airlines. And no, you won't come out ahead in total travel time; those little planes just can't cross the Pacific in one hop, especially if you're coming from the East Coast US.
The people you know probably just go from the East Coast to London or something, which is a pretty short trip. Try flying to Australia or Japan instead.
I have relatives in an Asian country where even the middle class can afford to have maids and a driver or two. Whenever I visit I'm never quite used to having someone take your dishes away (versus cleaning them yourself), doing your laundry, etc. I doubt I'll get over it any time soon.
What's weird to me is the value business puts on being physically present places.
It's great to have the opportunity and serendipity of being somewhere, but you can get that flying commercial, even moreso flying coach. That it's the person sitting in the place that makes a decision go in a particular direction, and not just reasoning it though and using communications tech seems odd. If you need something, you need it. I don't see what's so complicated.
What is that magic juice?
On the other hand, I'm also watching a deal get scuttled right now because of the lack of personal introduction and relationship between the negotiating parties (it's online, and you can just see the value physically evaporating for lack of trust and reciprocity).
You can read people more closely, when you are physical there. You see the developer looking down, when you bring up tech debt, you can talk about stuff during breaks, and discover errors and culturally ingrained preconceptions that dont align. Lots of nuance, you would never see via remote.
Some buisness partners dont directly say no, but instead telling you that a term is impossible by claiming they will get back to you on that. Also the strain of the negotiation makes both sides give up vital info over time - to just end it.
The difference is that we're evolved for physical interaction. Using all of your senses and social cues and the surrounding environment to interact with someone makes a big difference.
It's how you can read the tone of the room, see tiny changes in expression, hear the differences in intonation, shake someone's hand and feel their demeanor, measure the level of background chatter, check if people are really paying attention, etc. All of this helps us have more honest and confident communications which underlies deal making and business.
Unless we get to matrix-level VR, this is something that can't be replicated by any kind of tech and will always require travel to get that full experience.
Let’s say you are making a deal worth $100m. Could communicating better improve the value of the deal by 1%? Then it’s not a stretch to spend $100k to get the best communication possible.
I once was a passenger on a billionaire owned private jet (he owned two). The owner picked me up in his rental (I worked for his son, the billionaire was visiting). We all drove to the back of the airport, almost right up to the plane. The pilot and co pilot were waiting for us. They loaded the luggage, and a rep from the car company took the keys to the rental. The jet owners wife had a pre-made tray of food with her. We climbed on board. The pilot said "all ready?" and off we went. Once airborne, the owner spread out a flat bed and slept. His wife served us some food.
It wasn't just the time saved: if was the avoiding of all the hastles of airports: parking, line-ups, security, more line-ups.
The owner had set up a leasing company for his two jets. Of course he had priority, and had to make sure that his planes were not leased out when he wanted them.
Not a single mention of the carbon footprint of a private jet. This has to be the single most selfish mode of transportation and is essentially inexcusable at this point in history.
A car vs a bicycle seems to me to be way more extreme than an individual flying on a personal jet to a location a commercial jet can’t access (people forgot that there’s exists 10s of thousands of remote small airports private planes, not commercial, can fly too that might otherwise require an indivisible to fly commercial to the local major airport and then drive another few hours to get too)
Driving to your local grocery and flying private are orders (plural) of magnitude different in terms of carbon footprint. If your local grocery is 10km away, you'll save ~2.5kg of C02 if you cycle instead of drive[1]. If you fly for three hours, you'll save ~700kg of C02 if you choose to fly commercial instead of private[2]. I don't see how the _former_ is "way more extreme".
Yes, nobody is disagreeing with that, and in rare cases only private will be possible, but other greener options are almost always available. The greenest one usually being: not flying at all.
Who said anything about diesel? Airlines can already purchase biofuel-derived Jet A.
Distribution is still limited, but it is available at a few major airports. For instance, I just took a flight on SAS. They have an option to pay extra to use biofuel for one’s share of the flight.
That should be hectomillionnaire (hM, I guess?) if they meant ~100M. Otherwise it's just ~100k, which is above their minimal quoted expenses per annum.
OK I just did this because the words are fun to say:
1B is a kilomillion
100M is a hectomillion
10M is a decamillion / dekamillion
1M is a million
100k is a decimillion
10 is a centimillion
1k is a millimillion
They aren’t always as narrow as they look if you buy a big enough jet (an a380 is not narrow), but the main reasons are fuel efficiency, cabin pressurization efficiency, and ease of maneuverability on the ground.
Owning a jet doesn't save you time. If you want to save time, you rent.
In the late 1990s I was a newly minted private pilot and I decided to fly my (rented) Cessna 182 from El Monte, California to Santa Barbara to attend a conference. It didn't make any financial sense, I just did it because it was cool. With the overhead of getting to and from the airport it actually took me longer to get to the conference in the plane than it would have taken me to drive (and of course it cost about 5x as much).
One of the other attendees also arrived in a private plane, and that was Charles Simonyi. It turned out that my little Cessna was parked next to his Falcon jet, so at the end of the conference I offered him a ride back to the airport, which he accepted.
Simonyi got aboard his jet (after giving me a little tour) and I went to do my pre-flight. As I was doing that I heard the engines on Simonyi's plane spool up and down, up and down, and then shut down. Then the door opened and Simonyi got out, so I went over to see what was going on.
"Disaster," he said. They had a red light on one of the engines. The plane was grounded. And he had to be in Hungary in 15 hours (or something like that) for a family member's wedding.
I offered to fly him to LAX in my Cessna where he could pick up a commercial flight, but he declined. So I left him there, stuck at the airport like any ordinary shmoe.
Many years later I learned about charter jets. If you have the coin, you can get a jet dispatched to you on demand. I have no idea why Simonyi didn't just do that. At the time I had no idea it was possible, so it didn't occur to me to ask.
Chartering is both cheaper and more reliable than owning by wide margins. The only reason to own is so you can keep your toothbrush on the plane.
But nowadays, with a laptop and a cell phone, location is pretty much irrelevant. There's not a whole lot of difference in terms of productivity between being at home or at the office and being in an airport lounge. So there is really no excuse for anyone to fly private unless you really need to pack in more site visits than commercial schedules will allow. That's not a whole lot of folks, and it's certainly not the CEO. If you're the CEO of the kind of company that can afford private jet money, people should be coming to you.
> "If you're the CEO of the kind of company that can afford private jet money, people should be coming to you."
Renting makes sense but that line doesn't. CEOs aren't the boss, they serve their customers. They're often the face of the company and always the top salesperson.
You go to your customers and keep them happy if you want to be in business, you don't demand they come to you. The bigger the company, the more the CEO tends to travel.
Part of this was also setting an example so the company would not have to pay for first class travel (or private) for other executives and/or employees. So the cost is much higher than just his ticket (or his private jet). What do you say to the VP's etc? So you suffer yourself in coach. It shows a certain bizarre frugality.
> “he doesn’t think the company should be paying for it,”
This goes to the point that I am making. When he did fly private he paid out of his own pocket so as not to create a circumstance that it was going to happen for others at the company.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadFor truly private jet flights it can be trickier. Many truly private jets operate as private flight operations under part 91 of the FAA’s rules. That has a lot less red tape for a private operator but means they truly need to be a private operator and can’t pickup others for hire.
Several startups have tried to get around the above via legal loopholes via ‘Uber for airplanes’ models and got shot down by the FAA.
However for small planes (Cessna etc.) pilots have to reach their flight hours and for financing that take passengers. Sometimes just for scenic round-trips. Sometimes over longer distances. Examples for sites arranging this (German examples) are https://flyt.club/ https://www.mitflugzentrale.de/ or international https://www.wingly.io/
That's not really Uber for planes, but it gets you places in a way that is often much more expensive otherwise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_English_Channel_Piper_PA-...
If you can't, you'll find that you're really just buying into hype more than actual productive travel. All of the arrangements will have strict conditions on passengers, luggage, arrival/departure times and many trips will only be 1-way so you're left finding your own way back, and that might be from small regional airport somewhere.
The kind of plane Steve Wozniak had his famous crash with in 1981?
Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC
From accounts, it sounds like he stalled the plane on climbout. He claims his girlfriend leaned on the controls, which doesn't make a lot of sense, because leaning on the yoke would push the nose down, preventing a stall. Who knows what actually happened.
But yes, a novice pilot with a fast, sophisticated plane is asking for trouble.
Besides, if you can afford a plane for trips like this the cost of hiring a pilot to fly your plane is in the noise and well worth is just so you can get something done.
That’s often not true. They do ask and you have to provide records but it doesn’t necessarily impact rates. Pilots are generally wealthier, better educated and need to undergo regular medical exams to keep their certificate. All things that statistically make one healthier. There are many aspects that make a pilot a more attractive life insurance candidate from a risk standpoint, not less.
I can get a nice cheap policy as a pilot with the small airplane exclusion though, but since piloting the small aircraft is one of the more dangerous things I do, seems like not a good idea to exclude it.
My policy is not written in such a way.
* Pilots have lower risk of death than the general population (because of health requirements and general wealthiness)
* A person who decides to become a pilot has a higher risk of death than if they didn't (because a lot of private pilots crash)
How becoming a pilot affects life insurance is based on the second, not the first.
What are the odds of two instrument rated BASE jumpers on HN?
Even billionaires play with OPM, and key man insurance is a thing.
Edit: If you buy one of the piston versions second hand. I just checked Wikipedia and it seems like Piper realised what I said above at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-46 (and charge accordingly).
Definitely airport pairs where this could be a huge time savings though.
There is no way in hell that aviation has “saved me time” overall. It does save me time on the day of a trip when everything goes perfectly, but there are many winter days in New England that are flyable by twin jets that are not flyable even in de-iced piston singles. You just don’t have the power surplus or airspeed to plan to climb through a moderate layer of icing.
If you lived on an island and commutes to the mainland near a satellite airport is one scenario where you could save time overall. Otherwise, it’s a time-consuming (and very fun) pastime.
An an aside, if you're an executive, flying private with your team (all as passengers) makes it easy to continue to work on the flight and prepare for the upcoming meeting. If you're busy piloting the plane, it becomes much harder if not impossible to be a part of that.
I routinely fly through clouds but don't fuck with ice :)
It took my wife and I about three months to do our instrument ratings where that was pretty much our solid focus. It felt like a bit of a slog at the end, but pretty rewarding.
Apparently, his father wooed his mother by taking her on dates to the "mainland."
1. You, an exec, are going to want to see an ROI on the substantial time and money commitment you made in getting instrument rated. So you're going to want to use that aircraft as much as possible. Back when you flew commercial, you'd sit in the back of a 737 debriefing yourself after a brutal meeting with a gin and tonic and some angry emails to your minions. Now you've gone straight from having your ear burned off by a furious client to negotiating complex clearances in the clouds.
2. Get-there-itis kills. And now you have a plane, so, sure you can make that widget sales meeting in Spokane and be back in time for your kid's game... But the weather is closing in. You sold your spouse on the idea of a private aircraft just for situations like this, so you could be present for family and grow the business. Oh, but the client is on the fence, so maybe you need to stick around for a bit and admire their factory. Hey, no takeoff time right? Now it really is time to go. Ceilings are low, there's ice, a storm en-route, it's all a bit marginal. But you don't want to miss junior's first pitch so off you go into the murk and a couple hours later some volunteer firefighters from a town you've never heard of are shoveling what's left of you into black sacks while trying not to vomit.
All of which is to say, it's a brilliant idea as long as your travel area enjoys VFR conditions most of the time. Now your instrument rating is a buttress for your safety, instead of an excuse to extend your limits.
In my opinion, this is one of the more important things to member. In my life, it explains why I ran out of gas tying to get to a meeting and why I didn't backup $busy_executive Outlook PST file before doing a "repair".
The author goes through a bunch of case studies of people in survival situations, some who made it, others who didn't. The ones who didn't generally did something that seems pretty stupid at first glance. He gets into some neuroscience and you realize how easy it would be to make the same mistake.
To my mind the pilot is weighing a few possible future outcomes:
- satisfying some obligation by completing the journey, getting pats on the back or avoiding further trouble.
- disappointing or angering stakeholders (clients, wives and sisters-in-law, children) by cancelling a journey due to prudence, and then, potentially, further feeling that one will be perceived as inadequately skilled at something which is a prominent part of one's self-identity.
- taking off anyway and maybe having to make an emergency landing en route, thus demonstrating eagerness to complete the journey and a heroic, skillful handling of a dangerous situation.
- dying in a fiery crash.
Even outcome three ends up being positive for the pilot. They get all the social credit for having attempted the journey, plus an unimpeachable excuse for failing to complete it. Dying in a crash is just a hard thing to imagine, so maybe features far less in the flight decision emotional risk balancing than it should.
One of the vanishingly few safety things which the scuba diving community does perhaps better than aviation is the idea that "any diver may thumb [abort] a dive for any reason at any time," and that is fully expected to include just 'feeling bad.' It is an integral part of the buddy system which doesn't have an analog in aviation, but maybe there could be a mental preflight checklist which could be used to identify situations where GtI is a factor and thus give the pilot a basis for staying on the ground when their gut is saying, "don't take off!"
https://www.salon.com/1999/07/20/reckless_2/
Visual flight rules aviation is far more prone to weather delays than any other mode of travel. You can walk in a rainstorm or drive in a blizzard if you really want to, but it's straight up illegal to fly in conditions below certain visibility thresholds.
If the company I worked for had an exec/part time pilot mandating I flew with them they'd be my ex-employer in an eyeblink.
Depending on the airport and your timing, if you have TSA Precheck + Clear, no checked bag and a scheduled car service, you can get dropped off, through security and onto a United/Delta with basically no waiting.
The mandatory annual grounds your plane for at least a few weeks, and that's the best case scenario where your plane does not have significant ADs or issues. Aircraft maintenance shops are very busy (have been for a couple years due to mandatory ADS-B upgrades and are still working through those backlogs) and therefore expensive.
Finding a good and honest aircraft mechanic is also a dilemma, and you're kinda geographically bound in your search. Hasn't happened to me (I hope), but if you flip through the pages of "Plane and Pilot" or "Flying", it's full with the stories of "mechanic suggested a $20,000 engine overhaul, I spent the next two weeks researching the issue on my own, called multiple friends of mine and it turned out I just needed to replace a $300 part".
Airplane ownership favors those mechanically inclined. There are like hundreds of random things that could seem merely suspicious during the pre-flight inspection, but turn out to be a major problem when dug deeper. People who have done flying professionally (airline pilots, airforce) and mechanics seem to have an edge on this.
> "mechanic suggested a $20,000 engine overhaul, I spent the next two weeks researching the issue on my own, called multiple friends of mine and it turned out I just needed to replace a $300 part"
Do you think the equivalent in the web industry is a someone stating an entire app needs an overhaul, "because PHP" when maybe it is a simple bug fix?
Us engineer minded folks are quick to want to re-engineer things.
The $300 part fixes your problem today, the rebuilt engine fixes the reliability problem you might still have after the $300 quick-fix.
Please identify which part of the post was a personal attack so I can fix it to your satisfaction
How to fix it: don't mix personal language with sharp criticism, and don't use a prosecutorial style. We want curious conversation here, not cross examination. The guidelines cover all this and more: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It sounds like you know a lot in this field. The very best thing to do in that case is not to go on about others' ignorance (demonstrated or assumed)—it's rather to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn.
I can't edit that comment anymore though.
There are no 20k overhauls for jets.
Even with car driving, haste to reach a destination is a bad advisor and often leads to accidents. Planning with ample time buffers is also increasing safety there.
A lot of famous people have been killed in small-plane crashes. If we could go back in time and keep musicians from flying on private planes, just imagine how different music might be now: Buddy Holly, Randy Rhodes, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Lynyrd Skynyrd (band members), Rickey Nelson, Ritchie Valens, just to name a few.
Interesting article btw, there's a lot more to it than the title implies.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/04/call-for-ba...
https://m.fourseasons.com/privatejet/journeys/remote-wonders...
I heard that very few people, even billionaires really own their jets. Leasing, rent, "uber," and club memberships are way more common.
Second, you do not save time flying a private jet. He said he knew a number of CEOs who had more than enough money for a charter, but often had to fly economy class because it's the only ticket you can realistically buy same day on a minute notice. One said that arranging a private flight usually takes a week or more, and you have to be shuttled from a small, remote airport, adding hours to the trip.
I can myself confirm the later as I once met Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in an economy class!
The later really tells that private charter doesn't really work anywhere but parts of US and Europe, and more being more of a shuttle service than real point to point transport.
Not surprising. The "three Fs" rule has fewer and fewer exceptions the higher the dollar amounts involved.
Busy airports usually do not like private flights. But well, not all large airports are busy; and not all small airports are remote (it's usually the other way around).
Citation (no pun intended) needed.
I fly my T206 into Las Vegas, Houston IAH, Phoenix, and other busy airports all the time and those airports are perfectly welcoming, assuming you know what you are doing
1 - https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/profiles/medi...
The majority of HN are from the US/the anglosphere/wealthy western nations. A large percentage of HN are in a profession that pays above average (engineering). A smaller but I guess not insignificant percentage are investors. HN is in no way representative of the general population.
But it takes a lot of money to buy a jet. I would not be too sure that the very top of the global wealth scale is well-represented here, either. Dicking around on a web forum seems like a waste of time for someone with the means to live the life they want.
>A large percentage of HN are in a profession that pays above average (engineering)
Not related. Even if you're a director at Google pulling 1m a year in, you're not buying a private jet. Or, you're not unless you're reckless.
The reason HN would have a far higher audience of people who own or have access to private jets is because a bunch of tech entrepreneurs who've really made it, such as the Collisons and Drew Houston, have come through here on their ascension and some of whom are still around.
How many of them do you think browse Hacker News?
[0]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/17/n...
Cost per hour, per passenger is μ=$320.28, σ=$67.45, assuming the plane is full.
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2015/november/1...
Figure $2/mile for fuel on a long trip, $3/mi on a shorter hop. Jet-A ranges from $2.75/gal to $5/gal typically (with some outlier airports being higher). Fuel is heavy and hurts performance, so it’s rare to tanker significant quantities of “cheap” fuel.
Those figures are roughly right for a legacy Citation with JT15s. Bigger jets might be more. Newer jets might be more fuel efficient (and correspondingly more expensive to buy). A legacy Citation is a 50-150 hour/yr airplane. Fly it much more than that and you'd be better off in a newer Citation with the FJ44s (more expensive engines, much better fuel specifics).
Looking at our FBO here, Jet-A is ~$5.80/gal and 100LL is ~$5.50/gal
Everyone I know who flies private optimized their time way beyond what you described. Is your experience different?
I think it just shows that either a. The time argument is a rationalization or b. It’s socially more acceptable to spend money largely out of sight on corporate aviation, rather than having people in your everyday life see an enormous household staff
There is a video (and I believe it's linked in this thread) about a Walmart exec visiting stores across the country. It's likely in some small to medium sized town with a regional airport. If they meet with the team from 9-12 and the next flight out isn't until 5pm, they are wasting that time waiting. Instead they fly their plane in, meet, fly out at 12:15 and are in the next town with the next manager in 45 minutes.
It's just that a $500 town car for the day is more practical than having a chauffeur fly with you to Hong Kong, Bali or Cannes...
What makes you think this? I would have thought the bar for getting a personal trainer or a housekeeper is far far lower than the bar for people getting corporate aviation? Many middle class people manage to afford a personal trainer and housekeeper.
Put another way, corporate aviation costs several thousand dollars per hour of time saved, and most people that use it have not exhausted time savings that are easier to come by
That said I think there's also something in the social acceptability of services being higher than that for servants.
It’s hard to find the time to hire people.
Also fair to mention that it's not as much of a time savings too but convenience they can afford. But they mainly by time on NetJets, and not the jet.
AKA the higher-performing companies could afford private jets. What is up with this spurious assumption of causation?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetJets
What is the norm worldwide is long intervals between getting into the airport and the airplane departure and between airplane arrival and one getting out of the airport. As a norm passengers waste at a minimum 2 hours before departure and 30 minutes after arrival.
With a private jet you set the route and the schedule.
It all adds up to a lot more convenience and time savings, never mind how fancy first class service you get on regular commercial flights.
Especially if you’re going somewhere where’s there’s no direct flight option. Just a single connection flight will cost an hour or more.
As someone who puts in-flight entertainment systems in private jets, the only common thing I've seen in the ownership groups is an ability to afford the price tag. There are definitely a lot of buyers who are getting into this for time gains, but there are also buyers who are simply interested in privacy, luxury, or some peace and quiet. I ended up having to troubleshoot an in-flight issue on a ~$60 million private jet and the investment in sound-proofing insulation is totally worth it.
They said that one of the most important factors for the ultra-wealthy was time. This involved wealthy individuals:
- Hiring personal assistants (to run errands)
- Hiring personal chefs (no time wasted cooking)
- Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc)
We can't control the flow of time, but we can most certainly use it to our benefit.
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...
Robert Caro masterfully paints the picture of what life was like in rural Texas for women making homes before their area was electrified. It wasn't just time saved. It was hard, physical labor that caused their bodies to break down that they were saved from.
Really quite hard to fathom for any of us accustomed to growing up without that burden.
I had no understanding of what that sort of life must have been like before reading the chapter, but after it stuck with me so strongly. I felt wholly inadequate trying to summarize it above.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86524.The_Path_to_Power
It's about 60 miles from Round Rock or downtown. I prefer the northern route.
The ranch is ... out in the middle of nowhere. And if you keep on heading West, even that seems densely populated.
Imagining that without power, gas, or phones, gives pause.
https://www.nps.gov/lyjo/planyourvisit/visitlbjranch.htm
For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days.
I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.
Some excerpts from Caro:
> the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands
> the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...
Back in the day I did consulting work on a personal level for an ultra-wealthy person. He was into making electronic music as a passion. This was in the days of 486/pentium, so the tools available to do this were relatively expensive. He'd create something and slip a couple of hundred to a club DJ to play it when he went out.
Anyway, he would use a floppy and throw it away. I realized he did this to save time. No need to format the disk and reuse, he would just pull another one out. He was buying time.
It infuriated a relative of mine when I told the story due to waste, but I explained to her those minutes he would spend formatting the disks wasn't spent. He came out ahead.
My parents grew up in an environment (semi-rural) where/when it seems to have been normal to leave trash around, though. This was in the 50s. I guess they saw the issues and raised my siblings and me differently.
It makes me happy that more people are thinking about not trashing their environment!
Many will say that expecting the government to help is hopeless. However, that is fatalism, and an improperly functioning government doesn't negate the fact that only government can guide the market to preserve the resources of the future (including our health.)
Meaning what exactly? Anybody is free to create value and realize profit from it. It's not a privilege. Nor does it mean you "should" do anything.
No one “should” do anything, except that you pay for not doing it in the end.
The economics of whether to own vs rent (netjets etc) is essentially about scale.
Then back, right after the meal.
The BBQ place looked at him and said "uh... we ship directly to NY, you know" hehehe
If I were rich, I'd use it all the time.
The problem with private jets is that they severely limit where you can travel, unless you don't care about leaving the continent. Private jets tend to be small (unless you're John Travolta), and small jets have limited range. Accordingly, they can't easily cross oceans. If all you care about is going between NY and FL or CA, then they work fine, but if you want to fly to Asia, you'll have to book a ticket on a major airline like the rest of us.
Even the smaller private jets, such as a Citation, have a range of 6,500km, which is still more than enough to go transatlantic in a single flight, or even US<->Asia in 2 hops. For comparison, a Boeing 757 (often used for smaller US<->Europe and US<->South America flights) has a range of 7,200km.
I'm not aware of any direct fligts, but usually it's just 1 layover away.
It's a great city (Hanoi), although I have no doubts that Tokyo is awesome too.
If you go into any flight tracker app that lets you filter air traffic by altitude, you'll find many of these business jets buzzing around up at 50,000 feet or so. Not sure what regulations (or lack of) lets them fly so much higher than normal commercial aircraft but there you have it....
But that's not the issue here; my contention way above was the private jets aren't any good for extremely long-distance intercontinental routes, and no one has disproven this assertion yet, though several have tried.
I know a few people who travel across oceans in private jets. Even with the stops, you can come out ahead in travel time and total comfort.
I seriously doubt that. I've been in corporate jets like Citations. They're really tiny inside; I can't stand up in them at all. Small jets do much worse with turbulence, and being so small inside, they just aren't going to have the amount of space available that you get with a first-class "cubicle" that you get on one of the top-tier international airlines. And no, you won't come out ahead in total travel time; those little planes just can't cross the Pacific in one hop, especially if you're coming from the East Coast US.
The people you know probably just go from the East Coast to London or something, which is a pretty short trip. Try flying to Australia or Japan instead.
It's great to have the opportunity and serendipity of being somewhere, but you can get that flying commercial, even moreso flying coach. That it's the person sitting in the place that makes a decision go in a particular direction, and not just reasoning it though and using communications tech seems odd. If you need something, you need it. I don't see what's so complicated.
What is that magic juice?
On the other hand, I'm also watching a deal get scuttled right now because of the lack of personal introduction and relationship between the negotiating parties (it's online, and you can just see the value physically evaporating for lack of trust and reciprocity).
But what's the difference? Is it just charisma?
Some buisness partners dont directly say no, but instead telling you that a term is impossible by claiming they will get back to you on that. Also the strain of the negotiation makes both sides give up vital info over time - to just end it.
You also get a much better feel and extract more information by being on site.
It's how you can read the tone of the room, see tiny changes in expression, hear the differences in intonation, shake someone's hand and feel their demeanor, measure the level of background chatter, check if people are really paying attention, etc. All of this helps us have more honest and confident communications which underlies deal making and business.
Unless we get to matrix-level VR, this is something that can't be replicated by any kind of tech and will always require travel to get that full experience.
"If it flies, floats or 'loves', you should rent it, not own it."
It wasn't just the time saved: if was the avoiding of all the hastles of airports: parking, line-ups, security, more line-ups.
The owner had set up a leasing company for his two jets. Of course he had priority, and had to make sure that his planes were not leased out when he wanted them.
If so, why didn’t you use a bicycle.
A car vs a bicycle seems to me to be way more extreme than an individual flying on a personal jet to a location a commercial jet can’t access (people forgot that there’s exists 10s of thousands of remote small airports private planes, not commercial, can fly too that might otherwise require an indivisible to fly commercial to the local major airport and then drive another few hours to get too)
[1] https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycli... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/private...
Don’t undervalue the importance of time.
Diesel powered jets. Instant classic :D
Distribution is still limited, but it is available at a few major airports. For instance, I just took a flight on SAS. They have an option to pay extra to use biofuel for one’s share of the flight.
If I pour coffee on purpose on your living room mat, does cleaning your windows make it ok ?
That should be hectomillionnaire (hM, I guess?) if they meant ~100M. Otherwise it's just ~100k, which is above their minimal quoted expenses per annum.
And is there any reason why all jet are so narrow, the point is they dont feel spacious at all. Is that the limits of Aerodynamics?
[1] https://boomsupersonic.com
In the late 1990s I was a newly minted private pilot and I decided to fly my (rented) Cessna 182 from El Monte, California to Santa Barbara to attend a conference. It didn't make any financial sense, I just did it because it was cool. With the overhead of getting to and from the airport it actually took me longer to get to the conference in the plane than it would have taken me to drive (and of course it cost about 5x as much).
One of the other attendees also arrived in a private plane, and that was Charles Simonyi. It turned out that my little Cessna was parked next to his Falcon jet, so at the end of the conference I offered him a ride back to the airport, which he accepted.
Simonyi got aboard his jet (after giving me a little tour) and I went to do my pre-flight. As I was doing that I heard the engines on Simonyi's plane spool up and down, up and down, and then shut down. Then the door opened and Simonyi got out, so I went over to see what was going on.
"Disaster," he said. They had a red light on one of the engines. The plane was grounded. And he had to be in Hungary in 15 hours (or something like that) for a family member's wedding.
I offered to fly him to LAX in my Cessna where he could pick up a commercial flight, but he declined. So I left him there, stuck at the airport like any ordinary shmoe.
Many years later I learned about charter jets. If you have the coin, you can get a jet dispatched to you on demand. I have no idea why Simonyi didn't just do that. At the time I had no idea it was possible, so it didn't occur to me to ask.
Chartering is both cheaper and more reliable than owning by wide margins. The only reason to own is so you can keep your toothbrush on the plane.
But nowadays, with a laptop and a cell phone, location is pretty much irrelevant. There's not a whole lot of difference in terms of productivity between being at home or at the office and being in an airport lounge. So there is really no excuse for anyone to fly private unless you really need to pack in more site visits than commercial schedules will allow. That's not a whole lot of folks, and it's certainly not the CEO. If you're the CEO of the kind of company that can afford private jet money, people should be coming to you.
Renting makes sense but that line doesn't. CEOs aren't the boss, they serve their customers. They're often the face of the company and always the top salesperson.
You go to your customers and keep them happy if you want to be in business, you don't demand they come to you. The bigger the company, the more the CEO tends to travel.
Part of this was also setting an example so the company would not have to pay for first class travel (or private) for other executives and/or employees. So the cost is much higher than just his ticket (or his private jet). What do you say to the VP's etc? So you suffer yourself in coach. It shows a certain bizarre frugality.
> “he doesn’t think the company should be paying for it,”
This goes to the point that I am making. When he did fly private he paid out of his own pocket so as not to create a circumstance that it was going to happen for others at the company.