Business jets are brilliant tools. By cutting out busy airports and by flying close to from and to where they are needed they massively increase the productivity of management. A management team using one can achieve in a day’s work that would take a week using commercial airlines. If anything they are not used nearly enough, especially by governments.

The jets vary enormously in size, from titchy cramped models that can only usefully carry 4 people and have a range limited to Europe right through to models as big as an airliner that can fly non stop pretty much between any two airports on earth. The Bombardier Global series (which cost about $8,000 per hour to operate) are a very popular example of the latter.

I was very interested to see the following posted to a popular aviation forum about the use of a Global owned by a British public company.

Now there is nothing wrong with a company boss letting his wife borrow the Global to go shopping in LA (at a flight cost of around $200,000), other than the carbon emissions. What is wrong is that the shareholders don’t know about it and that, presumably, he isn’t being taxed on the benefit.

Here is the above C&P in text form:

“We dance to the tune of our billionaires who expect us to turn a blind eye to their affairs and omit to mention the “last business trip” next time we fly their wives to get their hair or nails done in Moscow ( no one good enough in London apparently) .
Mrs is taking the Global to LA next week on her own to do a little shopping because she is bored.
If all this was private money it would be bad enough but it is not. Many of these excesses are funded by PLC companies with public shareholders….upon whom we rely for dividends in our pension funds. The last example I have quoted of bored Mrs Fat Bum’s shopping trip to LA is on an aircraft that is paid for by a London FTSE 250 company which has not paid a dividend for years and whose share price is heading for ever relentlessly down…currently fifty percent below its level two years ago. Due to the clevernesses of accountants and lawyers this running sewer depleting precious funds at the whim of the CEO and his family is so concealed that no one seems any the wiser…..least of all Its over paid auditors ( maybe there is a clue there)”

It would not be very difficult to find out who this is. Not many underperforming FTSE 250 companies run Globals.