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Two local companies are offering charter flights for busy area executives
FLIGHT PLAN
111Two companies based at the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in Vienna are helping executives avoid those problems by offering charter flights.
“It’s a customer convenience thing,” said Kelley Baumiller, charter coordinator for Winner Aviation. “They just come here, they go where they need to go and they come back — at their convenience, not at the major airline’s convenience.”
Reducing time out of the office is key for customers, said Mike Hillman, co-owner of the other charter provider, Cortland Air.
“I think that’s probably the majority of what you hear from any of our customers, is just convenience,” he said.
Also, instead of always landing at major airports, “we can get into destinations that are closer to your job site or your business,” added Matt Stroney, co-owner of Cortland Air.
Cortland Air’s twin-engine turbo Seneca is chartered about twice a week.
“It’s a great plane for five or six hundred miles,” Stroney said. “It’s a nice radius for a day trip, for business or pleasure.”
Virginia Beach, New York, Boston, Indianapolis, Chicago and Detroit are all within that range.
For Winner, Indianapolis and Harrisburg, Pa., are popular destinations. Baumiller said the typical user would be businessmen who have different work sites to visit.
“Pretty much, the east of the Mississippi kind of routes are a good one-day trip for us,” Baumiller said.
Stroney and Hillman have offered charter flights for four years.
“We bought the plane for personal use and saw a need for the charter,” Stroney said.
Winner has offered charter service for about five years. Its charter plane, a King Air B100, is in use 40 to 50 hours a month.
While not cheap, chartering a plane rather than using a commercial airline is cost-effective for some, said Stroney.
“Does it cost more? Yes. Is time worth money? Absolutely,” Stroney said. “Where’s your time best spent? Sitting in an airport?”
A good example, he said, is a local company with business in Virginia. The company hired Cortland Air to fly three people to a 9 a.m. meeting that ended at 4 p.m. Stroney had them home for dinner.
In the end, he said, they tallied up the cost and chartering the flight was cheaper than booking three flights on commercial airlines, renting cars, booking hotel rooms and being out of the office for three days.
“It was more cost-effective to charter,” Stroney said.
Cortland Air charges $400 per flight hour, plus a crew fee of $600 to $1,000. Winner Aviation, which offers a larger plane than Cortland, charges $1,095 per flight hour and a crew fee of $800. A crew consists of two people.
Cortland Air, which also offers a flight school, employs four. Winner Aviation, which provides fueling, maintenance and hangar space for private planes, employs 50.
Business isn’t the only reason to charter a plane. Stroney has taken personal day trips to New York City to shop and see the Rockettes. Special occasions are another option.
“There’s a lot of little airports throughout the country that have great restaurants,” he said.
Cortland has also been called on for more immediate requests.
After Hurricane Katrina, for example, a local person chartered a flight to pick up an elderly relative stuck in New Orleans. Another time a truck driver on his way through town learned his wife had been killed in a car crash in northern Michigan. Within an hour, the Seneca was in the air and the man was on his way home.
“They were private charters, and we were able to do that immediately,” Stroney said. “That’s one of the benefits of having private charters.”