Companies Allowing Employees to Fly

Up until the Compaq merger, Hewlett-Packard used to have an "employee
pilot" program. Some of the requirements were pretty stiff (time, annual
checkride with the company chief pilot, high insurance liability
coverage) and were designed to discourage VFR weekend pilots from using
their aircraft for business trips. Nevertheless, it was a reasonable
program for semi-professional pilots.

Since the influx of the Compaq management however, that program has been
completely cancelled. Even though being lobbied to re-authorize the
program, HP's current management has turned a deaf ear.


-----Original Message-----
From: .Blueskies. ]
Posted At: Friday, November 17, 2006 7:28 PM
Posted To: rec.aviation.owning
Conversation: Companies Allowing Employees to Fly
Subject: Companies Allowing Employees to Fly


"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...