Recently, a student reporter wrote a piece about the university administration spending $300,000.00, on private jets. Most of the trips were to the state capital 150 miles away. It was interesting to me because a few years ago the local newspaper had written an article criticizing the college president for using a university foundation King Air to travel the same trip. I had responded with a letter to the editor demonstrating how the use of the airplane was actually cheaper than having him drive. So now I have to explain all over again since the young reporter never investigated the true facts about corporate flying.
The college president makes about $900,000.00 per year. This amounts to $450.00 per hour. The roundtrip would take about 7 hours to drive, and most times cause a layover in a hotel and loss of his services for 2 days for a meeting of a couple of hours. He would be paid for the 7 hours driving time @ $450.00 per hour plus the time spent due to the layover. This could amount to $7,200.00, and then the additional cost of the automobile and gas. It is wasted time for an executive to miss that much time at his job and expose him to the travails of the trip in an automobile. This kind of calculation is used to sell the corporate jets that we see every day being used by corporations and the university is the largest corporation here.
When I was working part of the responsibilities that I had was to take care of the corporate airplanes. We had 2 jets and used them frequently to carry the executives and many others to places that were too far to drive to easily. Years before I had used the airplanes to fly a team of people to the University of Iowa each week for a month to manufacture a product there. I had to justify the use by compiling the expense of using commercial airlines and time loss due to their schedules. I proved that we could save money and work a full 5 days a week using the corporate airplanes. This continued for a couple of years until we built a facility to make the product in Puerto Rico. We only flew when it could be justified, and I was responsible for the budget for the airplanes, fuel, pilots and maintenance. The airplanes were very expensive but when used properly they saved us money on transportation and many trips could not be accomplished without them. which brings us back to the university staff and their use of an airplane. There are no commercial flights between Morgantown and Charleston and the only way to travel between the 2 cities is by automobile or private airplane.
If the reporter had dug into the subject a little more, she could have found out that the airplane being used had to travel about 70 miles to pick up the university people. The university was using an out of town flying service instead of a charter service in Morgantown that has jets plus turbo props, and they could fly much cheaper due the shorter total distance traveled and the use of smaller airplanes when only small groups were traveling. This would have been a more impactful story to write and would be something to follow up on. I hope the reporter gets to read this and then follows up on her story. I tried to reach out to the paper but got no response.
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