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Comment by rickd | Hacker News Reader

I'm generally opposed to the bailout in its current (and previous) form- but if you look at the facts, this MIGHT actually end up saving the company some money...

Sure, they get a new jet out of it and that leaves a bitter taste in everyone's mouth- and sure, it might not be "right" or "fair" in everyone's minds - but it's simple math.

Buy one jet for 50mil, sell 2 older jets for 27mil - make a small profit of 4 million and only carry the maintenance/fuel/crew costs of one jet instead of two.

Personally, I think they could probably do without ANY corporate jets, or probably COULD just sell one old jet and keep the other...

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But assuming the jets are of roughly equal performance and capacity, can't they just sell one jet for $27M and keep the other?

Not to mention, how much is a cross-country flight in first class these days? $1500? How many execs can you fly for the cost of that airplane? (the answer: over 33,000)

That's already not including hangar, maintenance, pilot/stewardess/ground labor, nor fuel...

My guess is they can fly all their top-dog execs in first class for a clean decade for the price of that plane. I would really like to see them justify this.

I would so the real number of flights would be closer to infinity because the cost of maintaining and flying a private jet across the country is more than the cost of the first class tickets. Also the interest / depreciation on that 50 million works out to ~3 million a year which is 2,000 / 12 people = 166 first class flights by it's self. Double that if you only average 6 people.

Yeah... I imagine it would cost more than $18,000 to fly a plane-load of people across the country. Not to mention the fact that you need to keep pilots and other crew on-staff even when the plane is on the ground... the costs just don't add.

Makes you wonder why they bother. Last I checked first class was still plenty pampered.

Ehm you don't really wonder why they "bother", do you?

Just wanted to say that I think the argument for "needing" corporate jets was that the time spent traveling on commercial airlines was detrimental to the company. Supposedly those private jets are used to get the executives from one place to another in a quick way so they could do more business or keep doing business and not be interrupted.

Like everyone else though, I'd like to see some scientific proof of that.

I suspect that if that were really the case, you'd hear about it from corporate jet sellers ("We compared our clients to their Fortune 500 peers, and found that companies with jets outperform the rest of the market by 2% a year!")

Well, to be fair, I wouldn't hear about it, because I do not make >20million a year :)

I wonder how advertising works for the super-super-duper rich?

As it turns out, this is actually one of the selling points used by the manufacturers: "If time is money, then the time saved jetting from continent to continent is money in the bank." --- http://www.gulfstream.com/products/g650/

They're not generally selling to engineers so AFAIK they don't try to make the argument rigorous and quantitative, but there it is.

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