..Blueskies. wrote:
"Blanche" wrote in message ...
: Long ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...when I worked for Boeing (and it
: really wasn't that long ago) we had to take 15 employees (2 managers and
: the rest engineers) on a trip to meet customers. Our in-house travel
: agency couldn't figure out what was going on, since we had to change
: the dates repeatedly over the 2 month period. I finally took over
: all the planning (logistics - no big deal, I ran it as if it was an
: engineering project!)
:
: On a lark, I called Seattle and asked about "borrowing" one of the
: jets that the Executives use. Turns out that yes, we could make
: arrangements and use it at the same billed cost as the execs. The
: overall cost would have been 50% *cheaper* than flying commercial.
: Why? Because due to the changing schedule, we had to pay full-fare in
: order to mitigate changing the flights.
:
: For some strange reason, my boss was *not* surprised I did this, but
: would not take it to our director (just under the VP level).
:
: Bummer.

Any employee in our company can try to book a flight on the company jets. There is even a rudimentary reservation
system. The catch is that there has to be enough demand locally and the planes need to be passing by. Sounds good until
you actually try to use it. Imagine, the CEO is on board, but we are going to stop by Kalamazoo to pick up a design
engineer that needs to go to Cleveland...


I used to work for General Dynamics and when there was a group of 10 or
so who had to go from San Diego to LA for a evening meeting of a Tech
Society we were able to use a corporate aircraft for it. This was long
before I started flying and I did not know the benefits of GA but it a
no brainer for this flight as we all worked a full day, flew up for the
meeting and returned that night. All we had to do was submit the
request and have the various sign offs but it worked well for us. This
was in the 80s so who knows what the process would be now.