Efficiency for your business means more than merely supply chain optimization or manufacturing continuous improvement programs.  Efficiency for your time and your critical revenue drivers in your organization can mean winning the contract or coming in second place.

We are seeing a tremendous amount of organic growth in the private aviation travel for business as companies are coping with reduced commercial flight routes and less than optimal schedules of those routes. For example, new customers to private aviation in the trailing twelve months, have comprised 50% of the recovery flight hours for the industry.  Some companies have experience more than 300% increase in new customer growth.

Why has this happened? Your time value of resources have never been in a more competitive environment than the challenges presented with the response to the Covid pandemic. As a result, travelers are looking at alternatives to avoid the waiting times at commercial airports as well as health safety of their most precious resources, the right people in the right jobs, within their organization. When you consider the cost per hour of your top performers and their travel to meet a customer, or your customer’s time when they come to meet you, time management and budgeting costs must consider all of the aspects when considering the method of travel.

As a case study, if you have six staff members then must travel 1,500 air miles to service a customer or project, if they fly commercially, they will be consuming a total of ninety-six hours total traveling time at the least when you include driving to and from the airport, security wait time, wait time for the aircraft, flight time there and back, travel to and from the destination airport and a host of other parasitic time consuming segments to achieve the mission goal.  Further, if the airport you are flying to commercially is a considerable distance from where you actually need to be, you have that time wasted as well.  As we consider the ineffective time on the commercial airline where your team cannot work in a secure and productive environment, we additional losses of productive time.

As a result, this total travel cost most often will exceed the cost of point-to-point service on private aviation for the same trip. Given the dramatic increase in new customers we have seen come to the industry in the last twelve months, we are seeing a substantial amount of your potential competitors realize the most efficient option they have is to fly privately. A particular customer of ours performed their own internal analysis of time value and came to the conclusion to lease a Bombardier Global 6000 to perform their historic staff movements on an annual basis would save more than three months of staff time per year by having their own aircraft. The benefits they calculated created the clear requirement for not only their first aircraft with us, they also see a benefit of a second aircraft to service their projects and customers in another region as well.

Private aviation makes sense when all costs and efficiency improvements are considered and it truly does cost less than you may think.

Author: John Zapel, COO of Kaizen