Money in the Sky

On the long gray tarmac, a handful of metallic planes glint against a white sky fifteen minutes south of Columbia.

“That one belongs to a bank, and that gent owns hotels,” says Randy Clark, general manager at Central Missouri Aviation, or CMA. “These people are in sporting goods—they got a car and went to MC Sports to check on something. They’ll be back in a couple hours and head back to wherever they came from,” Clark says from inside the navy SUV he uses to drive from one taupe hangar to the next.

They’re all in town doing business, except for one of them—a business jet a Columbia insurance company will be using to fly seven executives from Columbia to Denver, Topeka, Tulsa and back. At a price tag $1600 per flight hour, the four-day trip surely won’t be cheap, but Clark says the same trip on the ground would likely take two weeks. “For people who need private jets, time is money,” Clark says.

CMA, which was born in the wake of Skyways 1977 closure, plays a part in almost every non-commercial flight that touches down on the city-owned tarmac, flying into and out of about 5000 airports throughout the U.S and more internationally. From aircraft charter to management of privately owned planes, each flight is unique for Clark and the other CMA employees.

CMA has loaded 182 Puerto Rican national guards into a Boeing 767 destined for San Juan, unloaded service personnel from Afghanistan and the Missouri sports teams after its wins and loses. They’ve unloaded last-minute car parts for local manufacturers, and even cages full of monkeys.

A few years ago, when CMA took the seats out of its charter planes, loaded them up with dog kennels and flew to New Mexico. “We brought back three plane loads of howler monkeys so the university could start a research colony,” says Clark. “Some requests sound unusual to people, but crazy is a strange word.”

Time Money and Business
More than 90 percent of CMA’s operations are business travel. According to a report by NetJets, a world leader in private aviation, executives still consider face-to-face interaction as a key factor when closing a deal. Oftentimes, passengers will hit the tarmac, meet in one of CMA’s on-site conference rooms or offices, and jet off within the hour.

Clark and his coworkers are often some of the first to know when a company is considering opening a branch in Columbia or when big business deals happen, but a policy of strict confidentiality keeps those secrets safely within CMA.

At any given time, CMA houses around 60 private aircraft, along with its own two charter planes, which can hold five and seven passengers. “There’s not a big demand [for charter] in Columbia,” Clark says. “Most people who need an airplane here own their own.”

For customers who do want to charter a plane, Clark says the choice is not for the faint of heart. “Flying commercial is to flying private as taking the bus is to taking the limo.” But just how expensive each chartered flight would be depends on a number of factors.

“How fast do you want to go, how many people are you taking and how long do you want to be there?” Clark asks. For five people on a four-hour-each-way trip to Pasadena, Calif., on a small business jet going 400 miles per hour, with 500 to 600 gallons of fuel at $6 per gallon, the journey would cost $19,200—in addition to a 7.5 percent federal excise tax and the crew’s expenses while in Pasadena. In total, that trip would cost a ballpark sum of about $25,000.

“You could take a smaller, less expensive plane, but it would take more time and probably cost you more money because it’s slower,” Clark says. For example, if someone chartered CMA’s seven-passenger plane, the trip to California would take about eight and a half hours with two stops. So, to make that trip, Clark works with other charter companies, mostly out of Kansas City and St. Louis to find the right aircraft for the journey.

The charter planes work better for people who want to travel around the state—where the plane can reach anything within an hour—or at least within the Midwest. Clark says for a customer who may have a handful of branches throughout the state, the trip could be done in one day. 

Bob Billionaire and competition
“There are no hard and fast rules,” Clark says, because each situation is unique. “If you have the need for a private plane, if your time is worth that, you’re probably a unique individual to begin with.”

As he continues driving from hangar to hangar, he points out more planes. “That’s a hyper Saratoga,” he says, walking towards a relatively small jet. He says it costs $22 million and can seat five people and pilot. “It’s owned by three partners, one in the food business, one in mortgage and the other’s an entrepreneur.”

Another plane, he says, is owned by a couple former astronauts. At the southeast corner of the tarmac are two jets that dwarf every other aircraft at CMA. Clark doesn’t give any hints to the owners, but says each one cost about $60 million, can seat 15 people and has separate sleeping quarters. “It’s not uncommon for them to leave hear and go to London or Paris,” he says.

CMA’s twenty pilots need to know how to fly dozens of types of aircraft, from the smaller business jets to the $60 million monsters. Because each certification to fly a new class of plane costs around tens of thousands of dollars (the certification for the $60 million jet costs $65,000 alone), employee turnover is low, which also builds customer confidence, Clark says. “If you’re Bob Billionaire, you want to see the same people; you don’t want to have to answer the same questions every single flight.”

Flight attendants, which CMA contracts out, are only required on flights of 12 or more passengers, and cost an extra $1000 per day, and any customer who wants his or her own pilot or flight attendants puts that staff on his or her own payroll, because CMA uses a pool of pilots to keep down costs.

Mike Hayes, a longstanding pilot, walks into Clark’s office, full of model planes, framed photos of aircraft and a wall-sized Phillips 66 sign. He’s on call to fly the plane full of insurance executives to Denver, which, due to bad whether, has been changed three times in 24 hours.

CMA’s business hours are 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., but Clark and his coworkers are known to be out on the tarmac at all hours.

“Just the other night I left here at 2:30 a.m. after the Missouri men came back from getting their butts kicked in Kentucky,” he says. “We had to get them unloaded, refuel the plane and send it back to where it came from.”

The SEC has been a good move for CMA, which saw more than 75 visiting aircraft when Alabama was in town. When MU first joined the SEC, Clark called airports in each college town within the SEC to ask how each team traveled. Georgia and Alabama brought tons of fans, while Kentucky brought in only the team’s chartered plane.

When MU’s football team traveled to its last bowl game, it took a Boeing 767, but usually flies in a 737. For the Georgia team, which flies out of Athens, it takes three planes to get the whole team to a game—larger planes can’t take off from Athens’ runway.

Jefferson City also has a shorter runway that can’t accommodate some aircraft that Columbia can. For this reason, and the types of available planes, CMA isn’t in much competition with other local airports.

“All our competition is national,” Clark says. “I work with operators all over the country, so it’s more like collaboration than competition.” He says CMA’s clientele wouldn’t fly into Jefferson City, for example, simply because fuel costs are cheaper there, because then they’d have to drive to Columbia. “If planes are flying into Columbia it’s for a reason,” Clark says. “Time is money.”