3. You love flying and want to remain in aviation, but you're tired of working for someone else? You like the excitement and perks of successful corporate activity, but you want to escape from the rule-bound corporate airline environment, where you are overworked and underpaid and underappreciated? And it seems impossible, for as flight attendants you seem to be uniquely without options for professional advancement or innovation. You're tied to the commercial-airline system, whether nationally or internatinoally.
It may surprise you to know that entrepreneurial, small-business opportunities do exist in the aviation trade, if you plan well enough and if you appreciate your industry entry point realistically enough.
The opportunity I am going to talk about is corporate and charter inflight jet service. According to the National Business Aviation Association, commercial air carriers serve fewer than 600 airports in the United States, while business aircraft use more than 5,000 airports in America (NBAA), many of which are located in medium- and smaller-size towns and cities. Indeed, the hard business fact is that proprietary aviation may be the only form of efficient business transportation to such locations.
Then there is the appeal of corporate jets, whether the corporation owns its own fleet or--given the $2.6-million pricetag on the most modest corporate jets--sets up a timeshare arrangement with other corporations to save cash outlays (Banks 385). As Fortune Magazine recently put it: "A corporate jet confers comfort, security, and the strategic advantage of being able to whisk the big cheese anyplace, anytime-to provide face time for far-flung lieutenants, to chat up customers, to ink deals in person" (Farnham 54). It is hard to overestimate the prestige attached to a corporate jet, which flies subject to the client's schedule, not the airline.
Now of course this kind of convenience "does not come cheap" (Farnham 54). A n...