FLYING BOSSES: The Rise of Briefcase Barnstorming

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THE fleet of scheduled airliners in the U.S. is the world's biggest. But there is another commercial air fleet almost ten times as large: the 10,000 aircraft owned by U.S. corporations. Altogether, some 8,000 companies have $200 million invested in planes and ground facilities, and spend about $75 million annually maintaining them. Last year company planes, in flying 370 million air miles, logged 3,250,000 hours flying time—more than all U.S. domestic airlines combined. Their three-year safety record was also remarkable: they have had only one fatality for every 200 million passenger miles (v. 1.6 on commercial airlines).

The astonishing growth of the corporate air fleet is a postwar phenomenon. To a great extent, it has also been the salvation of the private-plane industry. At war's end the private-plane market boomed briefly, buoyed by the belief that someday every man would fly around in his own plane almost as easily as he drove his car. The boom soon collapsed; private planes were not only high priced, but most owners found them impractical because of their short range, slow speed and high maintenance cost. Such planemakers as Piper, Cessna and Beech then smartly went after the new corporate market. The first purchases of many corporations had been war-surplus planes ranging from light trainers to C-47s and two-engine attack bombers. But most corporations found them either so costly to operate or so unsuited to their needs that planemakers had little trouble selling them new craft.

Company airplanes today are essential tools of industry, though some corporations are still so sensitive to the tendency of stockholders to equate planes with yachts that they will not put their names on their aircraft. But business has sprouted wings because it had to; the pace of business has stepped up immensely since the war, and a company plane can save an executive 30% in travel time. In it, he can hop around the country and still be home on weekends, an important factor in keeping a key man if his job requires almost continuous travel.

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The dispersion of industry is another big factor in the growth of corporate fleets. Before 1940, nearly half of all American industrial plants were in cities of more than 100,000 population; now only one-third are. Moreover, 30% of new plants established since 1940 are in towns of 10,000 or less, many of them off the commercial airline routes. While only 535 communities have air ports big enough for commercial flights, some 5,000 have airports accessible to company planes. In some cases, speedy travel in a company plane enables corporations to get the equivalent of two or three men's work out of one high-priced executive. They have also discovered that the company plane, put occasionally at the disposal of a high-salaried man for vacation jaunts, gives him a better incentive than any heavily taxed cash bonus.