A company aims to make it easier for executives to work while flying around in corporate jets.
By Joe Sharkey
09/15/1999
The New York Times
Page 5, Column 1
c. 1999 New York Times Company
ON occasions when retired chief executives and other corporate bigwigs run into one another, they seldom talk about how they miss the old grind at the office. But they can get downright teary when they talk about how much they miss that lovely airplane.
The corporate jet is the perk of perks for business travelers. If you've flown in one -- soaring at a turbulence-free 50,000 feet near the speed of sound, breathing abundant fresh air in a cabin as comfortable as a living room, able to leap from exit door to car without making that death march through some vast dingy airport -- you know why there are 8,000 corporate jets now under registry. Or why there is an industry backlog of several years for new orders for most top models. And other companies are creating a big new market by acquiring a supply of corporate jets and essentially dispatching them, like airborne rental limousines, to customers who buy shares in the venture.
A good many working stiffs, including those who fly first and business class but most especially the ones wedged into coach on those eight-hour flights, obviously resent the fact that the boss might travel in such luxury, without having to deal with passive-aggressive flight attendants, in a Gulfstream V that set the stockholders back about $40 million. But for the sake of argument, assume that flying the brass in a private jet makes economic sense to many companies whose executives' time means real money. Shouldn't the stockholders at least expect the boss to work at something more important that the games on his laptop while traveling in such comfort?
'No matter where you sit on a commercial plane, that trip from New York to Los Angeles uses up basically the whole day,' said Dennis Ferguson, the president of a company called Airshow Inc. that is the major supplier of flight-information systems to corporate jets.
The most familiar of these systems is the in-flight map display, a video screen that shows topographical maps of the ground below superimposed with the airplane's present position, course, speed, altitude and estimated arrival time.
Though some executives say they can watch this gizmo for hours, mesmerized as it depicts them soaring over the earth, that's pretty old technology. At the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York recently, Mr. Ferguson and the company's vice president for business development, Patrick Flynn, were talking about new technology, including a system that allows the so-called information superhighway to start finding its way into the skies and keeping the tycoon actively on the job.
For years, corporate and other aircraft have had systems that can receive television signals from satellites, though the service usually works only when flying over land. But Airshow recently introduced a product, Network '99, that collects and transmits real-time, customized textual information, including news, financial and market data, as well as E-mail and other text messages, to specific aircraft from the company's headquarters in Tustin, Calif.
The system is still in its infancy because of current bandwidth limitations on the transmission to text. But that's changing, and in a few years, the corporate jet, and commercial planes as well, could be fully linked not only to on-ground data banks but to to the Internet, with companies like Airshow acting as information providers as well as distributors.
Getting this technology to fly means that Airshow has to keep track of where all those company planes are in the air at any given time. This raises issues of both logistics and security.
Mr. Ferguson says he has that covered. He used to run a company in Chicago that provided high-security limousine transportation for corporate clients.
'I see corporate travel as a security issue as well as an information issue,' he said. |
