By JOE SHARKEY – Published: July 8, 2008
The private jet industry has long struggled against the stereotype of the typical user as a well-off guy in a big corporate jet.
And you will see plenty evidence of the stereotype in New York next week, as squadrons of business jets arrive at regional airports delivering executives and clients for the All-Star game at Yankee Stadium. (Bringing along clients, of course, turns a day at the ballpark into a business trip.)
But as the National Business Aviation Association points out, about 75 percent of the 11,000 business jets in the United States are operated by small to midsize companies and entrepreneurs. And increasingly, especially within that niche, the boss in the company jet is likely to be a woman.
XOJet, the big private jet company, says that about 15 percent of its customers who contract for 100 hours or more a year in flight time are female. And while few keep precise statistics, all of the private jet companies I spoke with, including charter operators, said that women are a growing part of their market.
For women, ego and status seem to be less important as motivators than considerations like avoiding the problems and delays of commercial airports. Essentially, some say, you are buying time.
“I need to more carefully pick and choose how I spend my time, and the airplane to me is an enabler,” said Mary K. Swanson, a businesswoman in the Phoenix area who founded a wellness company, HealthCare Dimensions, in 1992 and sold it in 2006. She then founded the Swanson Family Foundation, a philanthropy that works among the poor in the United States and abroad.
Her plane is a light-cabin seven-seat Hawker 400, whose 1,400-mile range makes it ideal for foundation business that has to be done in a day, when a trip by commercial air travel can take twice the time. “It often makes me say yes when I would otherwise say no,” she said.
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