How to Buy a Private Jet
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They said that one of the most important factors for the ultra-wealthy was time. This involved wealthy individuals:
- Hiring personal assistants (to run errands)
- Hiring personal chefs (no time wasted cooking)
- Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc)
We can't control the flow of time, but we can most certainly use it to our benefit.
Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...
Robert Caro masterfully paints the picture of what life was like in rural Texas for women making homes before their area was electrified. It wasn't just time saved. It was hard, physical labor that caused their bodies to break down that they were saved from.
Really quite hard to fathom for any of us accustomed to growing up without that burden.
I had no understanding of what that sort of life must have been like before reading the chapter, but after it stuck with me so strongly. I felt wholly inadequate trying to summarize it above.
It's about 60 miles from Round Rock or downtown. I prefer the northern route.
The ranch is ... out in the middle of nowhere. And if you keep on heading West, even that seems densely populated.
Imagining that without power, gas, or phones, gives pause.
For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days.
I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.
Some excerpts from Caro:
> the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands
> the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...
Back in the day I did consulting work on a personal level for an ultra-wealthy person. He was into making electronic music as a passion. This was in the days of 486/pentium, so the tools available to do this were relatively expensive. He'd create something and slip a couple of hundred to a club DJ to play it when he went out.
Anyway, he would use a floppy and throw it away. I realized he did this to save time. No need to format the disk and reuse, he would just pull another one out. He was buying time.
It infuriated a relative of mine when I told the story due to waste, but I explained to her those minutes he would spend formatting the disks wasn't spent. He came out ahead.
My parents grew up in an environment (semi-rural) where/when it seems to have been normal to leave trash around, though. This was in the 50s. I guess they saw the issues and raised my siblings and me differently.
It makes me happy that more people are thinking about not trashing their environment!
Many will say that expecting the government to help is hopeless. However, that is fatalism, and an improperly functioning government doesn't negate the fact that only government can guide the market to preserve the resources of the future (including our health.)
Meaning what exactly? Anybody is free to create value and realize profit from it. It's not a privilege. Nor does it mean you "should" do anything.
No one “should” do anything, except that you pay for not doing it in the end.
The economics of whether to own vs rent (netjets etc) is essentially about scale.
Then back, right after the meal.
The BBQ place looked at him and said "uh... we ship directly to NY, you know" hehehe
If I were rich, I'd use it all the time.
The problem with private jets is that they severely limit where you can travel, unless you don't care about leaving the continent. Private jets tend to be small (unless you're John Travolta), and small jets have limited range. Accordingly, they can't easily cross oceans. If all you care about is going between NY and FL or CA, then they work fine, but if you want to fly to Asia, you'll have to book a ticket on a major airline like the rest of us.
Even the smaller private jets, such as a Citation, have a range of 6,500km, which is still more than enough to go transatlantic in a single flight, or even US<->Asia in 2 hops. For comparison, a Boeing 757 (often used for smaller US<->Europe and US<->South America flights) has a range of 7,200km.
I'm not aware of any direct fligts, but usually it's just 1 layover away.
It's a great city (Hanoi), although I have no doubts that Tokyo is awesome too.
If you go into any flight tracker app that lets you filter air traffic by altitude, you'll find many of these business jets buzzing around up at 50,000 feet or so. Not sure what regulations (or lack of) lets them fly so much higher than normal commercial aircraft but there you have it....
But that's not the issue here; my contention way above was the private jets aren't any good for extremely long-distance intercontinental routes, and no one has disproven this assertion yet, though several have tried.
I know a few people who travel across oceans in private jets. Even with the stops, you can come out ahead in travel time and total comfort.
I seriously doubt that. I've been in corporate jets like Citations. They're really tiny inside; I can't stand up in them at all. Small jets do much worse with turbulence, and being so small inside, they just aren't going to have the amount of space available that you get with a first-class "cubicle" that you get on one of the top-tier international airlines. And no, you won't come out ahead in total travel time; those little planes just can't cross the Pacific in one hop, especially if you're coming from the East Coast US.
The people you know probably just go from the East Coast to London or something, which is a pretty short trip. Try flying to Australia or Japan instead.
The kind of plane Steve Wozniak had his famous crash with in 1981?
Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC
From accounts, it sounds like he stalled the plane on climbout. He claims his girlfriend leaned on the controls, which doesn't make a lot of sense, because leaning on the yoke would push the nose down, preventing a stall. Who knows what actually happened.
But yes, a novice pilot with a fast, sophisticated plane is asking for trouble.
Besides, if you can afford a plane for trips like this the cost of hiring a pilot to fly your plane is in the noise and well worth is just so you can get something done.
That’s often not true. They do ask and you have to provide records but it doesn’t necessarily impact rates. Pilots are generally wealthier, better educated and need to undergo regular medical exams to keep their certificate. All things that statistically make one healthier. There are many aspects that make a pilot a more attractive life insurance candidate from a risk standpoint, not less.
I can get a nice cheap policy as a pilot with the small airplane exclusion though, but since piloting the small aircraft is one of the more dangerous things I do, seems like not a good idea to exclude it.
My policy is not written in such a way.
* Pilots have lower risk of death than the general population (because of health requirements and general wealthiness)
* A person who decides to become a pilot has a higher risk of death than if they didn't (because a lot of private pilots crash)
How becoming a pilot affects life insurance is based on the second, not the first.
What are the odds of two instrument rated BASE jumpers on HN?
Even billionaires play with OPM, and key man insurance is a thing.
Edit: If you buy one of the piston versions second hand. I just checked Wikipedia and it seems like Piper realised what I said above at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_PA-46 (and charge accordingly).
Definitely airport pairs where this could be a huge time savings though.
There is no way in hell that aviation has “saved me time” overall. It does save me time on the day of a trip when everything goes perfectly, but there are many winter days in New England that are flyable by twin jets that are not flyable even in de-iced piston singles. You just don’t have the power surplus or airspeed to plan to climb through a moderate layer of icing.
If you lived on an island and commutes to the mainland near a satellite airport is one scenario where you could save time overall. Otherwise, it’s a time-consuming (and very fun) pastime.
An an aside, if you're an executive, flying private with your team (all as passengers) makes it easy to continue to work on the flight and prepare for the upcoming meeting. If you're busy piloting the plane, it becomes much harder if not impossible to be a part of that.
I routinely fly through clouds but don't fuck with ice :)
It took my wife and I about three months to do our instrument ratings where that was pretty much our solid focus. It felt like a bit of a slog at the end, but pretty rewarding.
Apparently, his father wooed his mother by taking her on dates to the "mainland."
1. You, an exec, are going to want to see an ROI on the substantial time and money commitment you made in getting instrument rated. So you're going to want to use that aircraft as much as possible. Back when you flew commercial, you'd sit in the back of a 737 debriefing yourself after a brutal meeting with a gin and tonic and some angry emails to your minions. Now you've gone straight from having your ear burned off by a furious client to negotiating complex clearances in the clouds.
2. Get-there-itis kills. And now you have a plane, so, sure you can make that widget sales meeting in Spokane and be back in time for your kid's game... But the weather is closing in. You sold your spouse on the idea of a private aircraft just for situations like this, so you could be present for family and grow the business. Oh, but the client is on the fence, so maybe you need to stick around for a bit and admire their factory. Hey, no takeoff time right? Now it really is time to go. Ceilings are low, there's ice, a storm en-route, it's all a bit marginal. But you don't want to miss junior's first pitch so off you go into the murk and a couple hours later some volunteer firefighters from a town you've never heard of are shoveling what's left of you into black sacks while trying not to vomit.
All of which is to say, it's a brilliant idea as long as your travel area enjoys VFR conditions most of the time. Now your instrument rating is a buttress for your safety, instead of an excuse to extend your limits.
In my opinion, this is one of the more important things to member. In my life, it explains why I ran out of gas tying to get to a meeting and why I didn't backup $busy_executive Outlook PST file before doing a "repair".
The author goes through a bunch of case studies of people in survival situations, some who made it, others who didn't. The ones who didn't generally did something that seems pretty stupid at first glance. He gets into some neuroscience and you realize how easy it would be to make the same mistake.
To my mind the pilot is weighing a few possible future outcomes:
- satisfying some obligation by completing the journey, getting pats on the back or avoiding further trouble.
- disappointing or angering stakeholders (clients, wives and sisters-in-law, children) by cancelling a journey due to prudence, and then, potentially, further feeling that one will be perceived as inadequately skilled at something which is a prominent part of one's self-identity.
- taking off anyway and maybe having to make an emergency landing en route, thus demonstrating eagerness to complete the journey and a heroic, skillful handling of a dangerous situation.
- dying in a fiery crash.
Even outcome three ends up being positive for the pilot. They get all the social credit for having attempted the journey, plus an unimpeachable excuse for failing to complete it. Dying in a crash is just a hard thing to imagine, so maybe features far less in the flight decision emotional risk balancing than it should.
One of the vanishingly few safety things which the scuba diving community does perhaps better than aviation is the idea that "any diver may thumb [abort] a dive for any reason at any time," and that is fully expected to include just 'feeling bad.' It is an integral part of the buddy system which doesn't have an analog in aviation, but maybe there could be a mental preflight checklist which could be used to identify situations where GtI is a factor and thus give the pilot a basis for staying on the ground when their gut is saying, "don't take off!"
https://www.salon.com/1999/07/20/reckless_2/
Visual flight rules aviation is far more prone to weather delays than any other mode of travel. You can walk in a rainstorm or drive in a blizzard if you really want to, but it's straight up illegal to fly in conditions below certain visibility thresholds.
If the company I worked for had an exec/part time pilot mandating I flew with them they'd be my ex-employer in an eyeblink.
Depending on the airport and your timing, if you have TSA Precheck + Clear, no checked bag and a scheduled car service, you can get dropped off, through security and onto a United/Delta with basically no waiting.
The mandatory annual grounds your plane for at least a few weeks, and that's the best case scenario where your plane does not have significant ADs or issues. Aircraft maintenance shops are very busy (have been for a couple years due to mandatory ADS-B upgrades and are still working through those backlogs) and therefore expensive.
Finding a good and honest aircraft mechanic is also a dilemma, and you're kinda geographically bound in your search. Hasn't happened to me (I hope), but if you flip through the pages of "Plane and Pilot" or "Flying", it's full with the stories of "mechanic suggested a $20,000 engine overhaul, I spent the next two weeks researching the issue on my own, called multiple friends of mine and it turned out I just needed to replace a $300 part".
Airplane ownership favors those mechanically inclined. There are like hundreds of random things that could seem merely suspicious during the pre-flight inspection, but turn out to be a major problem when dug deeper. People who have done flying professionally (airline pilots, airforce) and mechanics seem to have an edge on this.
> "mechanic suggested a $20,000 engine overhaul, I spent the next two weeks researching the issue on my own, called multiple friends of mine and it turned out I just needed to replace a $300 part"
Do you think the equivalent in the web industry is a someone stating an entire app needs an overhaul, "because PHP" when maybe it is a simple bug fix?
Us engineer minded folks are quick to want to re-engineer things.
The $300 part fixes your problem today, the rebuilt engine fixes the reliability problem you might still have after the $300 quick-fix.
Please identify which part of the post was a personal attack so I can fix it to your satisfaction
How to fix it: don't mix personal language with sharp criticism, and don't use a prosecutorial style. We want curious conversation here, not cross examination. The guidelines cover all this and more: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It sounds like you know a lot in this field. The very best thing to do in that case is not to go on about others' ignorance (demonstrated or assumed)—it's rather to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn.
I can't edit that comment anymore though.
There are no 20k overhauls for jets.
Even with car driving, haste to reach a destination is a bad advisor and often leads to accidents. Planning with ample time buffers is also increasing safety there.
A lot of famous people have been killed in small-plane crashes. If we could go back in time and keep musicians from flying on private planes, just imagine how different music might be now: Buddy Holly, Randy Rhodes, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Lynyrd Skynyrd (band members), Rickey Nelson, Ritchie Valens, just to name a few.
It wasn't just the time saved: if was the avoiding of all the hastles of airports: parking, line-ups, security, more line-ups.
The owner had set up a leasing company for his two jets. Of course he had priority, and had to make sure that his planes were not leased out when he wanted them.
If so, why didn’t you use a bicycle.
A car vs a bicycle seems to me to be way more extreme than an individual flying on a personal jet to a location a commercial jet can’t access (people forgot that there’s exists 10s of thousands of remote small airports private planes, not commercial, can fly too that might otherwise require an indivisible to fly commercial to the local major airport and then drive another few hours to get too)
[1] https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycli... [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/private...
Don’t undervalue the importance of time.
Diesel powered jets. Instant classic :D
Distribution is still limited, but it is available at a few major airports. For instance, I just took a flight on SAS. They have an option to pay extra to use biofuel for one’s share of the flight.
If I pour coffee on purpose on your living room mat, does cleaning your windows make it ok ?
AKA the higher-performing companies could afford private jets. What is up with this spurious assumption of causation?
It's great to have the opportunity and serendipity of being somewhere, but you can get that flying commercial, even moreso flying coach. That it's the person sitting in the place that makes a decision go in a particular direction, and not just reasoning it though and using communications tech seems odd. If you need something, you need it. I don't see what's so complicated.
What is that magic juice?
On the other hand, I'm also watching a deal get scuttled right now because of the lack of personal introduction and relationship between the negotiating parties (it's online, and you can just see the value physically evaporating for lack of trust and reciprocity).
But what's the difference? Is it just charisma?
You also get a much better feel and extract more information by being on site.
It's how you can read the tone of the room, see tiny changes in expression, hear the differences in intonation, shake someone's hand and feel their demeanor, measure the level of background chatter, check if people are really paying attention, etc. All of this helps us have more honest and confident communications which underlies deal making and business.
Unless we get to matrix-level VR, this is something that can't be replicated by any kind of tech and will always require travel to get that full experience.
As someone who puts in-flight entertainment systems in private jets, the only common thing I've seen in the ownership groups is an ability to afford the price tag. There are definitely a lot of buyers who are getting into this for time gains, but there are also buyers who are simply interested in privacy, luxury, or some peace and quiet. I ended up having to troubleshoot an in-flight issue on a ~$60 million private jet and the investment in sound-proofing insulation is totally worth it.
I heard that very few people, even billionaires really own their jets. Leasing, rent, "uber," and club memberships are way more common.
Second, you do not save time flying a private jet. He said he knew a number of CEOs who had more than enough money for a charter, but often had to fly economy class because it's the only ticket you can realistically buy same day on a minute notice. One said that arranging a private flight usually takes a week or more, and you have to be shuttled from a small, remote airport, adding hours to the trip.
I can myself confirm the later as I once met Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in an economy class!
The later really tells that private charter doesn't really work anywhere but parts of US and Europe, and more being more of a shuttle service than real point to point transport.
Not surprising. The "three Fs" rule has fewer and fewer exceptions the higher the dollar amounts involved.
Busy airports usually do not like private flights. But well, not all large airports are busy; and not all small airports are remote (it's usually the other way around).
Citation (no pun intended) needed.
I fly my T206 into Las Vegas, Houston IAH, Phoenix, and other busy airports all the time and those airports are perfectly welcoming, assuming you know what you are doing
1 - https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/profiles/medi...
Interesting article btw, there's a lot more to it than the title implies.
The majority of HN are from the US/the anglosphere/wealthy western nations. A large percentage of HN are in a profession that pays above average (engineering). A smaller but I guess not insignificant percentage are investors. HN is in no way representative of the general population.
But it takes a lot of money to buy a jet. I would not be too sure that the very top of the global wealth scale is well-represented here, either. Dicking around on a web forum seems like a waste of time for someone with the means to live the life they want.
>A large percentage of HN are in a profession that pays above average (engineering)
Not related. Even if you're a director at Google pulling 1m a year in, you're not buying a private jet. Or, you're not unless you're reckless.
The reason HN would have a far higher audience of people who own or have access to private jets is because a bunch of tech entrepreneurs who've really made it, such as the Collisons and Drew Houston, have come through here on their ascension and some of whom are still around.
How many of them do you think browse Hacker News?
[0]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/17/n...
Cost per hour, per passenger is μ=$320.28, σ=$67.45, assuming the plane is full.
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2015/november/1...
Figure $2/mile for fuel on a long trip, $3/mi on a shorter hop. Jet-A ranges from $2.75/gal to $5/gal typically (with some outlier airports being higher). Fuel is heavy and hurts performance, so it’s rare to tanker significant quantities of “cheap” fuel.
Those figures are roughly right for a legacy Citation with JT15s. Bigger jets might be more. Newer jets might be more fuel efficient (and correspondingly more expensive to buy). A legacy Citation is a 50-150 hour/yr airplane. Fly it much more than that and you'd be better off in a newer Citation with the FJ44s (more expensive engines, much better fuel specifics).
Looking at our FBO here, Jet-A is ~$5.80/gal and 100LL is ~$5.50/gal
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/04/call-for-ba...
https://m.fourseasons.com/privatejet/journeys/remote-wonders...
Everyone I know who flies private optimized their time way beyond what you described. Is your experience different?
I think it just shows that either a. The time argument is a rationalization or b. It’s socially more acceptable to spend money largely out of sight on corporate aviation, rather than having people in your everyday life see an enormous household staff
There is a video (and I believe it's linked in this thread) about a Walmart exec visiting stores across the country. It's likely in some small to medium sized town with a regional airport. If they meet with the team from 9-12 and the next flight out isn't until 5pm, they are wasting that time waiting. Instead they fly their plane in, meet, fly out at 12:15 and are in the next town with the next manager in 45 minutes.
It's just that a $500 town car for the day is more practical than having a chauffeur fly with you to Hong Kong, Bali or Cannes...
What makes you think this? I would have thought the bar for getting a personal trainer or a housekeeper is far far lower than the bar for people getting corporate aviation? Many middle class people manage to afford a personal trainer and housekeeper.
Put another way, corporate aviation costs several thousand dollars per hour of time saved, and most people that use it have not exhausted time savings that are easier to come by
That said I think there's also something in the social acceptability of services being higher than that for servants.
It’s hard to find the time to hire people.
Also fair to mention that it's not as much of a time savings too but convenience they can afford. But they mainly by time on NetJets, and not the jet.
In the late 1990s I was a newly minted private pilot and I decided to fly my (rented) Cessna 182 from El Monte, California to Santa Barbara to attend a conference. It didn't make any financial sense, I just did it because it was cool. With the overhead of getting to and from the airport it actually took me longer to get to the conference in the plane than it would have taken me to drive (and of course it cost about 5x as much).
One of the other attendees also arrived in a private plane, and that was Charles Simonyi. It turned out that my little Cessna was parked next to his Falcon jet, so at the end of the conference I offered him a ride back to the airport, which he accepted.
Simonyi got aboard his jet (after giving me a little tour) and I went to do my pre-flight. As I was doing that I heard the engines on Simonyi's plane spool up and down, up and down, and then shut down. Then the door opened and Simonyi got out, so I went over to see what was going on.
"Disaster," he said. They had a red light on one of the engines. The plane was grounded. And he had to be in Hungary in 15 hours (or something like that) for a family member's wedding.
I offered to fly him to LAX in my Cessna where he could pick up a commercial flight, but he declined. So I left him there, stuck at the airport like any ordinary shmoe.
Many years later I learned about charter jets. If you have the coin, you can get a jet dispatched to you on demand. I have no idea why Simonyi didn't just do that. At the time I had no idea it was possible, so it didn't occur to me to ask.
Chartering is both cheaper and more reliable than owning by wide margins. The only reason to own is so you can keep your toothbrush on the plane.
But nowadays, with a laptop and a cell phone, location is pretty much irrelevant. There's not a whole lot of difference in terms of productivity between being at home or at the office and being in an airport lounge. So there is really no excuse for anyone to fly private unless you really need to pack in more site visits than commercial schedules will allow. That's not a whole lot of folks, and it's certainly not the CEO. If you're the CEO of the kind of company that can afford private jet money, people should be coming to you.
Renting makes sense but that line doesn't. CEOs aren't the boss, they serve their customers. They're often the face of the company and always the top salesperson.
You go to your customers and keep them happy if you want to be in business, you don't demand they come to you. The bigger the company, the more the CEO tends to travel.
And is there any reason why all jet are so narrow, the point is they dont feel spacious at all. Is that the limits of Aerodynamics?
Part of this was also setting an example so the company would not have to pay for first class travel (or private) for other executives and/or employees. So the cost is much higher than just his ticket (or his private jet). What do you say to the VP's etc? So you suffer yourself in coach. It shows a certain bizarre frugality.
> “he doesn’t think the company should be paying for it,”
This goes to the point that I am making. When he did fly private he paid out of his own pocket so as not to create a circumstance that it was going to happen for others at the company.
"If it flies, floats or 'loves', you should rent it, not own it."
For truly private jet flights it can be trickier. Many truly private jets operate as private flight operations under part 91 of the FAA’s rules. That has a lot less red tape for a private operator but means they truly need to be a private operator and can’t pickup others for hire.
Several startups have tried to get around the above via legal loopholes via ‘Uber for airplanes’ models and got shot down by the FAA.
However for small planes (Cessna etc.) pilots have to reach their flight hours and for financing that take passengers. Sometimes just for scenic round-trips. Sometimes over longer distances. Examples for sites arranging this (German examples) are https://flyt.club/ https://www.mitflugzentrale.de/ or international https://www.wingly.io/
That's not really Uber for planes, but it gets you places in a way that is often much more expensive otherwise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_English_Channel_Piper_PA-...
If you can't, you'll find that you're really just buying into hype more than actual productive travel. All of the arrangements will have strict conditions on passengers, luggage, arrival/departure times and many trips will only be 1-way so you're left finding your own way back, and that might be from small regional airport somewhere.
What is the norm worldwide is long intervals between getting into the airport and the airplane departure and between airplane arrival and one getting out of the airport. As a norm passengers waste at a minimum 2 hours before departure and 30 minutes after arrival.
With a private jet you set the route and the schedule.
It all adds up to a lot more convenience and time savings, never mind how fancy first class service you get on regular commercial flights.
Especially if you’re going somewhere where’s there’s no direct flight option. Just a single connection flight will cost an hour or more.
That should be hectomillionnaire (hM, I guess?) if they meant ~100M. Otherwise it's just ~100k, which is above their minimal quoted expenses per annum.
1B is a kilomillion
100M is a hectomillion
10M is a decamillion / dekamillion
1M is a million
100k is a decimillion
10 is a centimillion
1k is a millimillion