*Off Topic* - Anyone here tracking EP's movements???? Has he been flying to any potential takeover targets? Does CPQ own a jet???
John
Using Government Data, Web Sites
Track Highflying Execs in Their Jets
By THOMAS GOETZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Coca-Cola Co. Gulfstream V jet, a sleek craft with room for at least
a dozen executives, takes off from an airport outside Atlanta, bound for
Newport News, Va. Once on the ground, it rests for mere moments; then
it heads back to Georgia.
The purpose of the trip? Coca-Cola won't
say. A spokesman does say that the
company's "very strong preference" is that
the information remain private.
Too late. The secret comings and goings of
corporate America have been brought to
light. Thanks to the unanticipated blending of government data and the
Internet, just about anybody can now, for a fee, track the flight patterns
and movements of the nation's 10,000 company planes, including jets,
turboprops and any other craft that submit a flight plan.
Shame and Danger
Corporate America isn't pleased. Companies are alarmed that their private
peregrinations are on public display, and wary that the information is being
used by traders hungry for an inside tip on who is talking to whom or,
worse, by terrorists looking to make a statement. It also can be just plain
embarrassing: No company, after all, wants shareholders to know that its
multimillion-dollar aircraft is headed to, say, a tony enclave on New
York's Long Island for the weekend, as a Time Warner Inc. jet recently
was. "I don't know of any Fortune 500 companies located out in the
Hamptons," jokes Patrick McGurn, a program director at Institutional
Shareholder Services, a Bethesda, Md., firm that advises investors on
proxy issues. (A Time Warner spokesman wouldn't comment.)
Perks like corporate jets have long gotten under Mr. McGurn's skin;
during the Super Bowl and other marquee events, he used to send a crew
out to the host-city airport to copy tail numbers off planes to see which
executives were flying in for the big game on the company dime. Now, he
says, this "handy" new Internet tool lets him do the same thing
electronically.
Not just him, but anyone subscribing to the services of online vendors such
as TheTrip.com and Dimensions International. It's easy: Log into the site,
enter a plane's tail number, and within moments, the screen lists the plane's
location, where it is headed next, when it is due to land. Or enter an
airport code, and up pops a chart that lists planes recently arrived and due
in soon, with details on the departure city, estimated time of arrival, and
flight altitude. Tail numbers can be cross-referenced with owners over at
Landings.com, a Web site that stores aircraft-registration files in free,
easy-to-search databases.
Traffic at Teterboro
Here's what TheTrip.com turned up on a recent afternoon at New Jersey's
Teterboro airport, a busy field outside New York City: At 1:40 p.m.,
Cummins Engine Co.'s Hawker 800 jet landed, after a 2 1/2-hour flight
from Columbus, Ind. Six minutes later, a Falcon 50 owned by Anschutz
Corp. -- whose principal, billionaire Philip Anschutz, owns several Major
League Soccer teams, among other things -- touched down after a
one-hour flight from Martha's Vineyard, Mass. (Mr. Anschutz didn't return
a call seeking comment.)
Thirty miles to the west and 4,800 feet up, an
Oklahoma pharmaceutical company's
Gulfstream was heading in. And waiting on the
tarmac in Connecticut was a jet registered to
International Family Entertainment Inc., the
television company founded by evangelist Pat
Robertson and acquired last year by News
Corp., ready to take off for Teterboro at 3
p.m. sharp.
"It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to
use this," says Frank Johns, managing director
of Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services in
Arlington, Va., which is now warning corporate clients that the flight data
are out there. Among Mr. Johns's countermeasures: schedule dummy
flights, or charter third-party jets.
The data have been available since 1996, but weren't distributed widely on
the Internet until last year. Ironically, trade groups representing
corporate-jet makers and users pushed the Federal Aviation
Administration to release the data so that members could track their planes
in bad weather and for other purposes. "It's an incredible tool," says Philip
Bissonnette at JetCorp, which services airplanes at the Spirit of St. Louis
Airport outside St. Louis.
Information for All
Half a dozen companies, with names such as Flyte Comm and SkySource,
sell the data strictly within the aviation community. But the Internet
broadened the audience when several online vendors began transmitting
the data to subscribers. "This information is in the public domain," says
Mike Wilson, sales director at TheTrip.com, an Englewood, Colo.,
business-travel operation that has almost 400 subscribers paying at least
$100 a month each for tracking data. Mr. Wilson acknowledges the
concerns of corporate-aviation groups "as a scenario," but says no
substantive abuses have ever come to light.
As a precaution, the FAA says, it can keep tabs on high-tech snoops,
since it receives an annual list of vendor subscribers. "We know where the
information is going," says Jack Kies, manager of the agency's
air-traffic-control command center.
Still, in the right hands, the data are a potential gold mine. One Long
Beach, Calif., aviation-service company monitors landings at competing
airports -- and then cold-calls the pilots to pitch its facilities. A
flight-support firm in Anchorage, Alaska, uses the data to watch jets
crossing the Pacific -- as a means of touting its refueling and other
services.
Intriguing Arrivals
And then there's aspiring Internet sleuth Noah Marks, an associate at a
Seattle software firm who recently used the data to check on flights into
Seattle's Boeing Field, a popular corporate airport only 25 miles from
Microsoft Corp.'s Redmond headquarters. Recently, in addition to several
charter planes (whose passengers can't be traced), Mr. Marks spotted a
jet from General Electric Co. and one from Raytheon Co. "That's got to
be connected to Boeing, or maybe a software company," he suggests.
This kind of information, he says, is simply juicier than much of what else
he sees on the Internet. "You can learn so much about companies this
way," he says. "It's almost an invasion of privacy."
Most companies feel the same way -- though they are reluctant to say so.
Microsoft, which a spokeswoman says doesn't own any corporate
aircraft, declined to comment on the prospect of companies visiting
Redmond under watch.
"Nobody likes the idea of people watching their airplanes," says Jack
Olcott, president of the National Business Aviation Association, one of the
trade groups that lobbied the FAA to make the data public. He says
members "don't want to draw attention to this, either."
Part of their hesitancy could be in reaction to just how pervasive -- and
expensive -- company jets have become. Business aviation has hit a high
lately. Companies spent about $4.46 billion on corporate jets in 1997,
50% more than a year earlier. And these jets aren't cheap to operate: An
average six-hour round-trip flight aboard a $28 million Gulfstream IV
turbojet costs about $18,000, counting crew salaries, insurance, hangar
fees and maintenance.
Trade groups and the FAA have persuaded all the data vendors, including
TheTrip.com, to block the tail numbers of companies that want to remain
anonymous. So far, about 125 companies have requested such -- covering
only 300 of the 10,000 corporate aircraft in the U.S.
That means it's mostly open skies for now, which rankles executives who
cherish secrecy. The whole point of corporate jets, after all, is to "feel like
you're off the radar," says portfolio manager Doug White, who recently
flew aboard his company's jet from Minneapolis to Boston. He declines to
say why. |
