Farringdon

There's also the fleet of private planes that takes staff from LAS to "Area 51"

cornishsimon

Just for the record as its mentioned further up thread, but Filton is no longer an operational airport.

All that remains is the police and ambo service air support units.

That's not to say that all sorts of production don't still take place, but the only thing Landing at Filton in future will be houses Etc !


cs

GRALISTAIR

Correct. My sister-in-law's husband works in shipping at Warton and sometimes takes the inter-company flights. My sister in law used to work in purchasing between Samlesbury and Warton and sometimes needed to meet suppliers on a group purchasing basis at other sites and she has taken that flight on more than one occasion. My sister and her husband's best friend was a senior director for the company and has taken the flight on more than one occasion. Finally my brother-in-law was also a director for the company and worked for many years out of Kuala Lumpur but he took the flight once or twice before relocation. I am told the flight was always full. Directors of course had first refusal.

GRALISTAIR

And video conferencing -and Skype etc.

Circumknowitall

In a similar vein I was visiting CEG last year and noticed that bmi were subcontracted to fly from CEG to TLS and FZO at that time.

lhrsfo

And no doubt much is achieved on the telephone, video conference, in Costa Coffee (which is where I do a lot of my meetings) etc. But I do have to meet in person other people and most business people I know also have to do that. I should imagine most people on this board fully understand that - which is why they are frequent flyers in the first place. I very much doubt that, after many years in the private sector, there are many senior BAe employees left who owe their job or status to the TUPE regulations, daft as they may be.

IAN-UK

Cost/benefit analyis on corporate aircraft always requires significant amounts of goodwill and input massage to get the "desired" result. BAE has something of a head start in its ownership of the aircaft and control of other operating costs.

Once the company has decided to run what is, essentially, its own airline, flights will be filled:

• to support demand forecasts
• to lower unit costs

i.e. an operating profile that would quickly put a commercial carrier out of business.

Tomatosoup

It’s not just BAE Systems that use these flights, other related companies with interests in BAE etc can book a seat, like QinetiQ, MOD, DSTL, Thales... it is very feasible that 50 people a day might need to travel around 4 or 5 major sites who in total employ over 35000. And if you consider the other organisations eligible to use the service, you are looking at over 90000 employees. That is 0.05% travel rate??

Also you can’t have design assessments and inspections from the designers across Skype or a telephone when you need to see the physical object.

Also you have to remember the top secret nature of these meetings. They must be delivered through very secure mediums if done remotely and this is difficult and expensive. UK and other national security is at stake.

GRALISTAIR

Full disclosure - I have family and close friends that have and still work at BAE - one very senior who took these flights. I absolutely agree there are times when face to face meetings etc and all the reasons you give are valid. Equally - I know from insider info that not every trip taken is absolutely necessary.

CurtainRingSalesman

“you have to remember the top secret nature of these meetings”

BAE Systems does a lot of different things. Half of these meetings will be about whether you should have blue backgrounds to the annual report or green ones.

People on FT (including me) like to pretend their jetting around is Very Important Stuff but there’s a lot of useless toss going on.