Fed-up fliers putting themselves in pilot’s seat

For travelers with private pilot licenses, flying on business is not only a means to an end but also a passion.

Flying small, piston-engine planes in and out of general aviation airports -- they make up the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 5,200 airports -- would not work for the average corporate traveler.

In general, most business travelers would find it too expensive and too difficult to manage. But for a class of entrepreneurs and self-employed businesspeople who need to make relatively short-distance flights, it makes tolerable the kind of travel that would be unwieldy on commercial airlines.

Jeff Moorhouse of Carpinteria is a financial advisor for the Montecito office of the brokerage, investment banking and asset management firm Smith Barney, a division of Citigroup Global Markets Inc.

He vowed to avoid flying commercial whenever possible after a business trip that took him from Santa Barbara to Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Sacramento; Los Angeles and back to Santa Barbara.

“They lost my luggage on every leg of the trip,” he said.

His golf clubs went missing on arrival in Seattle, where he was scheduled to play golf with clients. His clothes didn’t make it to Portland and important papers he was to deliver to clients didn’t get to Sacramento.

“It was the trip from hell,” Moorhouse said.

He decided then to pursue a childhood dream and earn his pilot’s license for business travel as well as recreation.

Moorhouse joins thousands of other businesspeople who have put themselves in the pilot’s seat. More than 3.2 million flight hours were flown for business on general aviation planes in 2005, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. (General aviation describes any flight other than a military or scheduled airline flight.)

California lends itself to such travel. We have more general aviation airports than any other state, said Chris Dancy, spokesman for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn.

The nonprofit Frederick, Md.-based education and lobbying organization has 409,000 members nationwide.

California also has the most general aviation aircraft, 25,000 versus second-place Texas, which has about 18,000, according to the FAA.

Moorhouse flew last weekend from Santa Barbara and met me at Santa Paula Airport, a small general aviation airfield in Ventura County. Our meeting demonstrated some of the ease with which business can be conducted when flying into small airstrips.

I walked out onto the tarmac and watched as his plane landed. He taxied over to where I stood and we chatted for a few minutes. Then I climbed into the plane with him and his son Jeffrey, 12, and we were off for a short sight-seeing flight above the Santa Clara River Valley and the coastline.

Had we had business to conduct, we could have met at the airport restaurant over lunch or coffee, and Moorhouse could have been back in the air within minutes of the conclusion of our meeting. Some airports even rent office space by the hour.

The efficiency with which business can be conducted when not tied to a commercial airline’s schedules and without the hassle of navigating a large airport’s security is part of the appeal of flying oneself.

“I’d never be able to do my business without a plane,” said Bob Tmur, president of Sierra Vista Properties, a real estate investment firm in Santa Barbara.

Tmur flies himself weekly from Santa Barbara Airport to inspect apartment buildings that his company owns in Palm Springs; Las Vegas; Phoenix; Denver; Seattle; Boise, Idaho; and Portland and Eugene, Ore.

“If I had to fly commercial it would be a disaster,” he said. “I’d be away from my family three times as much as now.”

Still, the expense can be hard to justify.

“If you’re going to try to rationalize it from a cost perspective it will never work, I can guarantee you, and I’m a CPA,” Tmur said. “My spreadsheet is smoked.”

It can cost as much as $8,000 to earn a pilot’s license, said Dancy, and it takes most people a year or two to put in all the necessary flight hours. (For more information on becoming a pilot, go to www.projectpilot.org.)

And then there is the cost of the plane itself. A used Cessna 172, the most popular general aviation plane, according to Dancy, will set you back at least $50,000. From there the sky’s the limit.

Tmur figures he will spend $130,000 a year for payments, fuel, insurance, maintenance and other costs associated with flying his recently purchased 1980 twin-engine Cessna 340. For the 300 hours a year that Tmur says he flies, that works out to about $425 an hour.

“You’re never going to beat Southwest,” he said. “But start calculating what your time is worth.”

Moorhouse trims his plane expenses by being a member of the Santa Barbara Flying Club. He along with 49 others owns a share of four planes that they can reserve in advance. He pays $80 a month, which covers overhead, plus additional charges for any flight time on the airplane, which includes fuel.

Another potential downside for pilots of small planes is weather. Many of these small aircraft do not have pressurized cabins, which means that they cannot fly above bad weather and they can be grounded even when commercial planes are flying with ease.

The safety record of general aviation planes has been improving, but it trails that of commercial aviation, according to data compiled and analyzed by Robert E. Breiling Associates Inc. of Boca Raton, Fla.

In 2005, general aviation had an accident rate of 6.8 per 10,000 flight hours, including such atypical flights as those involving bush pilots. Commercial airlines, on the other hand, had an accident rate of just 0.2 per 10,000 flight hours.

Safety is a high priority in flight school and always on a pilot’s mind. As we flew 135 miles per hour at 1,500 feet above the blue Pacific on a crystal-clear day, Moorhouse was plotting where we could land in the event of an engine failure.

“I could put down on the freeway,” he said as he gently turned the plane back toward Santa Paula, where we landed safely.

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james.gilden@latimes.com