Chapter 23: Standing Out

Esther deemed it appropriate to jump my bones another two times before we made ourselves decent and went for another flying lesson. At the rate Esther had been learning since that memorable first lesson in June, I gathered she would probably be ready for her first solo flight by late September or early October.

As always, the time I could spend with her was way too short, but the next batch of visitors was about to arrive in the evening and I was needed back home too. Our newest employee had arrived and we needed to organize check rides for Friedl so he could renew his altiport permits.

Somewhat heavy-hearted I made my way back home. I had a team meeting come up the next day.

“Are you afraid?” Jack asked me during the team meeting. I had just told him that not I, but he would be the first to get the altiport permit at Courchevel, under the tutelage of Friedl.

“No, I’m getting it too, but for the PC-12,” I said. “I’m much more likely to fly there in that than the Dash-7. We don’t train a whole squad of pilots to fly the type, only for me to hog the flying hours on it. Occasionally I also have to take care of this here business.”

“Alright boss, sorry,” Jack back-paddled.

“Nothing to apologize for,” I told him. “It was a reasonable question. When Friedl shows you the approach for the first time tomorrow, you’ll realize that one could genuinely be afraid of flying into there. I certainly have the utmost respect for anyone who dares to do so.”

“Is it really that bad?” Fred asked our newest employee.

“I’ve done it hundreds of times,” Friedl said. “But I will never be not nervous when doing so. Ian is right, he wouldn’t be flying into there on the Dash very often, although I think he should get at least the type rating.”

“Is that a good idea?” I asked. “I would have to forfeit the type rating on the Jetstreams.”

“When was the last time you did one of the milk runs on those?” Fred asked. “Most of the flights you are doing are for Mark and his crew, and for good reasons. You know their various quirks best. The day will come when they need more than four seats and the Pilatus will be too small. That’s when you could use the all-business variation of the Dash-7.”

“Good point,” I agreed. “Why don’t we make it permanent then? Mark and his folks will remain loyal customers for some years to come. I’ll do those flights, mostly with Fred or Jack, depending on the type.”

Everyone agreed.

“Any big news while I’ve been in Hungary, Fred?”

“You should perhaps go there more often,” he said, making Sofia and Ira giggle. “Every time you go there we seem to get an offer we can’t possibly reject.”

He shoved a few printouts across the table. Everyone went silent while my eyes went wider with every paragraph I read.

“I have questions, Fred,” I said dryly when I was done.

“Fire away, boss.”

“Okay, the idea of becoming a feeder service for Air Berlin sounds good on first thought, but I still remember that feeder airlines back in the States are a cesspool of cutting corners to reduce costs. Is this economically viable?”

“The European market has much stronger customer protection rules,” Fred explained. “They can’t really try to outsource those flights to us for dumping prices. And that’s not why they are proposing it in the first place.”

“I found no explanation for the reasons in here,” I said and held up the papers.

“Air Berlin has a jet-only fleet,” Fred replied. “All of these routes would be flights on turboprops, but if they started to buy those, they would massively increase their maintenance overhead.”

“All big carriers do it like that,” Jack agreed with his brother. “British Airways have outsourced all their bird-whacker flights to SunAir of Scandinavia, KLM has Cityhopper and VLM, Lufthansa has offloaded the feeder flights to Cityline, Augsburg Air and Contactair.”

“Looking at the proposed routes, we would need at least ten if not more additional planes,” I noted. “Where to find those if we don’t want to steal them? Especially if we don’t want to add yet another new type, because that would balloon our costs.”