Business Airplanes Are Not Luxuries
Business aviation suffered another public relations fiasco last week when the top brass of Detroit's Big Three automakers each flew in corporate jets to Washington to ask Congress for a multibillion dollar taxpayer bailout. The most ardent supporter of business aviation can attempt to defend the multiple benefits of flying your own airplane, but nobody in aviation can rationalize the enormity of the issue these three handed to opponents of the Detroit bailout.

Luxury goods and service providers of all types are feeling the heat of the economic crisis, and the news media lumps private airplanes in with $3,000 women's purses and $500 per head cocktail parties. But airplanes are not in what I think of as the "luxury category" and they can emerge on the other side, while many lux goods probably won't.

While nobody can argue that flying in your own airplane on your own schedule to the airport most convenient to your destination isn't a form of luxury, it is most importantly a business tool that no other means of transportation can provide. Other "luxuries" are, in contrast, more expensive and fashionable items that perform the same task as lower cost counterparts. For example, a $200 watch keeps time as accurately as a $5,000 watch thanks to miniature electronics. So the difference here, or the luxury quotient of the watch, is $4,800 worth of something that can't be measured. A $20,000 car can carry you safely down the road at the speed limit and beyond, just as the $100,000 model does, so that $80,000 difference in cost has to be explained in terms of luxury. And a $2,000 diamond will keep you wed to your bride just as securely as the $50,000 rock, with the difference being settled at the divorce.

But business airplanes carry people with speed and safety to places that cannot be reached with the same efficiency by any other means. The airlines serve a few hundred airports in the United States, but business airplanes can use several thousand. Business airplanes cut travel times on many trips by hundreds of percent, and often save overnight stays, which can make any worker more productive. The fact that these and other business airplane capabilities simply can't be replaced at a lower cost means they are not luxuries in the same way as the term is generally used. A many-decades-long survey of companies that use airplanes versus those that don't shows the ones flying for business have overall better returns.

Having said all of that, there are still times when public perception of business aviation is more important than the realities of business travel. On that list of unusual trips is when you are going to ask elected officials to hand you billions of taxpayer dollars. In that case walking barefoot from Detroit to Washington would have been appropriate, or at least they could have driven one of the American-made cars they were going to tout to Congress.