PlasticPilot.net

One particular branch of aviation has always attracted lots of interest and fantasies, because it’s both discreet, and reserved to a happy few: private jets and business jets. Anyone heard some stories about golden lavatories in these flying palaces… Well, this is partly true.

To illustrate this, I chose to talk about a particular company: Privatair (please note that I’m in no way affiliated to Privatair, and pictures in this post come from their website). This company is amongst the ones offering private taxi, together with JetAviation and a few others.

Such companies offer taxi services for businesses or wealthy individuals. If you can afford it, this kind of services has lots of advantages, including:

1) You define the schedule
2) You go through quick customs / security / immigration checks in the airport’s VIP zones
3) A personal limo will take you to your plane, avoiding all check-in and boarding burdens
4) Aircraft performance permitting, they fly you to any small airport close to your destination
5) Personnal service on board is, let’s say, above standard

Now, let’s have a look and unveil some of the luxurious interiors that made the reputation of such way of travel… As mentioned before, Privatair operates quite a wide fleet, so I selected some pictures from their website for different size of aircraft.

Start with a LearJet 60, for a handful of passengers.

As you can see, the interior is tiny, but quite cosy… I hope you noticed the flower and the bottle of champagne on the table.

If your clan is a bit bigger, you can then opt for a Global 5000, which offers more room.

I personally slept in some hotel room that were not so well equipped !

Last but not least, if you’re travelling far away with all your (extended) family, why not renting a 767 ? Yes, you read correctly, a 767, even one with extended range…

At this point the question are: who uses that, and does it really make sense ? The first answer is quite obvious: there is a market for such companies. They flew for years, and in some busy airports, they can represent up to 30% of the traffic !

Apart from a few very wealthy and inactive people, most of the customers are businessmen moving from one part of the world to the other. In an economy where salaries of top managers can be expressed in thousands of dollars a day, the shareholders probably don’t want them to be waiting inactively, or spending hours in transfers and connecting flight, don’t they ?

And video conferencing or e-mail can’t solve all problems, there are still cases where a good old handshake is needed. And in such cases, planes just become time saving machines…

To finish with an little story, you should know that even working at the airport, and having good friends working there, it’s just IMPOSSIBLE to get on board of such planes for a short visit… secrecy’s one of the first values of such companies…

One of the lessons I learned from the creation of this blog is that a large interest for crashes and air disasters exist amongst readership. As I already mentioned, the work of the investigators is not easy, very time consuming, and base on many sources of information (testimonies when available, black-boxes, wreckage analysis, expert works, …).

These reports are the only valid pieces of information when discussing air disasters. Any other published information is based only on speculation, stolen and / or distorted information. Reports are quite complex to read and understand, but they are nevertheless available to public.

So as to familiarize you with such reports, here are some links to the reports published after accidents that attracted lot of media attention. Please feel free to comment if you have any question or remark.

Concorde crash in Gonesse, 25th of July 2000 - French BEA
Ueberlingen mid-air collision, 1st of July 2002 - German BFU
TWA800 in-flight breakup, 17th of July 1996 - US NTSB

I did not select these accidents because they all occurred in July, but because they represent different type of accidents, and have been produced by different investigation agencies. Thus they give an overview of what an investigation report is.

I’ve never been a fan of military aviation, but today I want to express all my sympathy and compassion to the family, friends, and colleagues of French Pilot, Commander Caroline Aigle, who died on Tuesday, the 21st of August 2007, from a rapidly evolving form of cancer, at age 32.

Commander Caroline Aigle was one of the people who helped modern aviation to progress, as she was the first female fighter pilot in the French Air Force. She got her chase pilot license in 1999.

One of the reasons for which I admire them is that she also combined her very demanding military career with being mother of two children. This certainly deserves high respect from all of us.