And because private jets can land on more airfields than commercial airliners can, they are often the only way for executives to travel directly from headquarters to factories and subsidiaries in less accessible locations. If boards would rather they spent more time working and less time watching someone repack their suitcase at the security gates, that’s their call. (Both of these arguments are slightly weakened by the scraping of air-traffic data that lets people track specific aircraft a paper published last year described a machine-learning algorithm designed to predict where a corporate jet is going to land while it is still in the air.)Ībove all, chief executives are busy people. So is privacy: it is really hard to finalise a secret takeover when there is a stranger spilling pretzels on you. The personal safety of top executives is one consideration: private aircraft are a big part of Meta’s outsized spending ($27m in 2021) on the security of Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive. If the corporate-jet inkblot spells excess to some, to others it represents hard-headed pragmatism. A research study from 2012 found that cost-conscious private-equity firms reduced corporate-jet fleets at firms they had acquired. Mr Immelt’s successor, John Flannery, made a point of putting ge’s jets up for sale when he took over in 2017. When Jeff Immelt, a former chief executive of ge, travelled on the firm’s private plane, a second one would sometimes follow him around the world as backup. Disquiet about his use of Credit Suisse’s private jet was one reason why António Horta-Osório resigned as chairman of the Swiss bank earlier in the year. The bosses of America’s big carmakers were excoriated for using their jets to travel to Washington, dc, to ask for a bail-out during the financial crisis in 2008. This view equates the company plane with entitlement and waste.
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