Corporate Flying Explained

My friend Ralph and I were watching that hit TV show Landman. It is written, produced, packaged, distributed, colorized, closed-captioned, and marketed door to door (one would assume) by Taylor Sheridan.

Taylor has a prolific creative mind, housed in a brain topped with a big cowboy hat. It is important to note that he also owns 78% of the State of Texas.

Ralph got up to get another iced tea and mentioned that there was “no way” that Angela Norris, the well-tanned and endowed wife character, would be attracted to Tommy Norris, Billy Bob Thornton’s character.

“I don’t care how much money Tommy has, that ain’t happening.”

It’s just a show, and Taylor knew that people like you and me would not watch it without the bikinis, the cussing, and the fancy jets that, for some creative reason, are always there when they need one, even if it is to go shopping to get over Ainsley going to college without her personal trainer or ab-roller.

“The show does display at least a minimum of knowledge about aviation,” said Ralph. “They all seem to know what an FBO is, and for once on television, corporate flights aren’t shown as non-bumpy, multi-orgasmic, champagne-swilling fun ride orgies in the sky.

“Yep,” I said, “Although they seem to have an awful lot of very bumpy flights. Maybe the crew could ask for smoother altitude from ATC once in a while.”

Corporate flying has been around for less than one hundred years, but maybe a short rundown of its history would be in order. Who knows? Maybe Taylor will glom on to this rendition of history and have Tommy Norris yell it, interspersed with the F word, while he is driving his truck to meet the drug cartel owner or on his way to the FBO.

Corporate Flying History — or “Flightman!”

People with jobs who had control of their business, had a lot of money, and wanted to get to the Hamptons before Muffie and Chad started corporate flying back at the end of that big war in the 1940s. They bought up surplus military bombers and transports that the post-war government was selling off for six bucks a piece—six fifty if you wanted a full tank of gas and the guns left on.

They had expert mechanics with names like “Buzzsaw” and “Greasy” cut window holes in the fuselages. Buzz and Grease were also asked to install twenty ashtrays, a bathroom, a magazine rack with Look and Field and Stream on it, and a really long couch along the side of the cabin next to a corner table with very sharp and angular edges that had a flying map glued on it.

It took a year or two, but the corporate heads of state discovered something that WWII bomber crews already knew—these aircraft are not comfortable and they are (in the words of the Kennedy family) “wicked noisy.”
Sitting in a bomb bay wasn’t the pristine, idyllic flight experience they knew they were entitled to in their roles as masters of industry.

So, Cessna came out with its first corporate air barge—the Cessna 172—and Piper eventually coughed up its version—the Tripacer.

Now don’t laugh, Ralph. These airplanes were advertised with very young, ambitious, corporate-looking men wearing fedoras (even while flying) who were overjoyed to fly to business meetings at a blistering pace of around 100 knots. Of course, airplanes back then only measured their speed in miles per hour, like true Americans. Not only could these mighty aircraft ply the skies in search of profit, but on the man’s day off, they could also carry the missus along with a kid or two who sported a buzz cut or a hair ribbon, depending on their gender. 

A historical milestone was reached on a windy day in the year 1959 when Joe Coate, the CEO of Amalgamated Deforestation (a subsidiary of Dow Chemical), looked out of his window while flying over rural Pennsylvania and noted that two Amish guys in a horse-drawn wagon were going faster than him.

Joe took the unfiltered cigarette out of his mouth and, leaning over to Rusty, his corporate pilot and nephew, said: “We just gotta find something faster than this POS.”

Before you get all testy, remember that in the late 1950s, “POS” meant “plane owning the sky,” so get your mind out of the gutter.

Everybody today, of course, knows that Amalgamated Deforestation later became Enron and went on to sell its fleet during an unfortunate bout of bankruptcy to the Alan Parsons Project. 

Just imagine, Ralph, what would have happened if corporate jets had never invented. Can you picture those thousands and thousands of 172s and Tripacers darkening the skies over Davos last week?

Lucky for aviation and oligarchs everywhere, a guy named Bill Lear stepped up.

Lear was born in 1903 and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood home of Mark Twain. Bill was six when he met Twain and was entranced by his stories about how he invented the corporate Mississippi steamship.

The stories must have made an impression, because his Aunt Gussy was constantly telling Bill to quit making models of corporate hot-air balloons.

Time went by, and much later in his life, when his wife, Ethel, got onto him about his constant airplane modeling said, “Bill, daggum it, would you please quit sniffing that glue, get out of the house, and invent something?”

And so, the Learjet was born!

Today, there are jets with names like Gulfstream, Citation, Phenom, and of course, the Boeing POS. 

Emirs, presidents, movie stars who are preaching about ozone depletion, and fictional tanned girls in bikinis fly them all over the world in search of profit and relaxation.

Ralph, saying nothing, cued up another episode of Landman after quietly moving the bourbon tumbler out of my reach.