Company GA Policy

jheyen

jheyen

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heyen
I am working on creating a draft GA travel policy for my company to present to our executive committee. The current highlights include an IFR rating and all currencies that go along with that, an IFR equipped aircraft, $1M liability with the company named as additional insured and reimbursement of actual costs for the use of the plane (strictly as transportation).

I'm curious for those of you that work for companies that actually do have a GA travel policy, would you mind sharing your details?

Thanks,
Matt
 
Everyone I know who does it, does it on the sly, or owns the company. I used to work for a company whose travel policy specifically denied flying in privately owned aircraft. It was a bummer . . .
 
I just formed my own company (again) and just had to sign an affidavit for my work comp carrier that I wouldn't use my airplane for business.

Not that I really care about that.
 
When I worked for my own company the President (I was VP) bristled at the danger of losing me in a crash but that was pretty much his only concern.

When we got bought out, the new company absolutely bars people from flying GA on company business (except for a few, nearly impossible to use corporate Citations). Small aircraft are very dangerous you know, they're one of the leading manufacturers of them and their engines and propellers (Cessna, Bell, Lycoming, Macaulay, and now Columbia and Beech).

My most liberal travel policies were the Federal Government (which had a stock reimbursement rate) and the State of NJ. When I was an administrator there as long as my next higher up signed off my voucher, they'd pay it. I put all sorts of interesting things on it like bicycle rentals.
 
Hank S said:
Everyone I know who does it, does it on the sly, or owns the company. I used to work for a company whose travel policy specifically denied flying in privately owned aircraft. It was a bummer . . .
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When I started working for my employer, there was no policy on this. Then it changed to "Employees can't fly their own aircraft on business related travel." I always wondered what would happened if I rented or borrowed an aircraft.

Today, the policy is that we can't fly anything other than charters or commercial for business travel.
 
My company (almost 30k employees) requires written approval from the CEO. I'm guessing this may be a loophole for management to be able to use their own planes for travel if they don't feel like flying in one of the corporate jets. I wouldn't even consider trying to get this approval until I have my ifr and likely my commercial.
 
Approval will NOT be given for employees to fly their own or rented aircraft while on authorized business. Due to the liability exposure , and because no travel accident coverage would be in force for any employee who is either the pilot, operator or owner (including fractional ownership) of an aircraft used for business travel, the use of personal aircraft for business travel is strictly prohibited.
 
The company I work for is in the aviation industry, employs quite a few pilots and check airmen, all of which are ATPs at least twice over, however were not sposed to use personal aircraft for company travel, I know a few of the guys who have been here for a while do, but I don't think they are reimbursed outside of auto style mileage. Kinda a don't ask don't tell
 
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I'm wondering what the losses for the insurance industry for private aircraft business travel have actually been.
I have a sneaking suspicion the ban is because they can, not actual loss ratios.
 
Dr. O said:
I'm wondering what the losses for the insurance industry for private aircraft business travel have actually been.
I have a sneaking suspicion the ban is because they can, not actual loss ratios.
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You would think a company who 40% of their business is GA would figure out a way to manage the risk to allow their own employees to use GA. But, now you know why TXT stock is a third of what it was ten years ago.
 
flyingron said:
You would think a company who 40% of their business is GA would figure out a way to manage the risk to allow their own employees to use GA. But, now you know why TXT stock is a third of what it was ten years ago.
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That's what happens every time the lawyers, accounting and the HR Dept are put in charge of running a company. :mad2:
 
GRG55 said:
That's what happens every time the lawyers, accounting and the HR Dept are put in charge of running a company. :mad2:
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Yep, loved watching the lawyers (one of them, now with a different company was actually a good friend). They also had a policy that no email was to be retained more than 30 days (their idea was it couldn't be used against them once destroyed). I pointed out that pretty soon the sarbox stuff was likely to require it to be kept forever, that didn't faze them. The head of our medical division pointed out that FDA regs on his product required the email to be kept indefinitely as well... at this point the lawyer's head blew up.
 
One thing to remember when talking about reimbursement...

If there are any passengers or cargo, you cannot use the business reimbursement clause in the private pilot privileges. Only pro-rata share, and the pilot may NOT be reimbursed his/her share.

Only if the pilot is solo may the pilot be reimbursed for their own expenses.

http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org.../mangiamele - (2009) legal interpretation.pdf
 
I would like to convince my company to buy that twin turbo airplane for shuttling employees back and forth between San Diego and Phoenix offices. Also to pay for my ratings for IFR, Multi and Com so I can fly such airplane.
 
flyingron said:
Yep, loved watching the lawyers (one of them, now with a different company was actually a good friend). They also had a policy that no email was to be retained more than 30 days (their idea was it couldn't be used against them once destroyed). I pointed out that pretty soon the sarbox stuff was likely to require it to be kept forever, that didn't faze them. The head of our medical division pointed out that FDA regs on his product required the email to be kept indefinitely as well... at this point the lawyer's head blew up.
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E-mail retention is a PITA.

However, the important thing is, if you can destroy, to do it by policy and consistently enforce that policy.

The worst thing you can do is do a massive cleanup the day before a suit is filed.
 
Yup, employee travel via GA is expressly prohibited in my company. The reason being that when not on a scheduled airliner and/or chartered flight, one would not be covered our travel liability policy. Now, I could probably do it on the sly by simply charging mileage, but it would probably raise some red flags when I started sending in expense reports quarterly for my trips to PA from OK. $1,200 in mileage reimbursement wouldn't exactly be cost-effective when SWA/UAL can do it for less than half of that.

The big wigs have some corporate jet lease time when they need to use GA, but I believe that falls under the "chartered flight" portion of the travel liability insurance.
 
Our company does not have a GA policy per se (I would be the one to write it if it did), but I produced a memorandum of understanding stating the intention and reimbursable rate of my aircraft when used for business purposes.
 
My employer won't even let us use our own personal automobiles for work travel over a certain distance. I am in the Phoenix area. There is a guy in my department that has meetings in San Diego with a supplier frequently. Our new policy prohibits him from driving his personal vehicle to San Diego. It's a five hour drive from our building to theirs. He has to fly commercial or rent a car to get there. It's all about the insurance, and liability avoidance.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Yup, employee travel via GA is expressly prohibited in my company. The reason being that when not on a scheduled airliner and/or chartered flight, one would not be covered our travel liability policy. Now, I could probably do it on the sly by simply charging mileage, but it would probably raise some red flags when I started sending in expense reports quarterly for my trips to PA from OK. $1,200 in mileage reimbursement wouldn't exactly be cost-effective when SWA/UAL can do it for less than half of that.

The big wigs have some corporate jet lease time when they need to use GA, but I believe that falls under the "chartered flight" portion of the travel liability insurance.
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When I worked for the DoD, we could be reimbursed on a per air mile basis, ONLY up to the cost of the airline ticket. If it cost you more, you were on your own. It still helped allow me to fly more often. Of course, trips beyond about 400 NMs were NOT cost effective.
 
Dr. O said:
I'm wondering what the losses for the insurance industry for private aircraft business travel have actually been.
I have a sneaking suspicion the ban is because they can, not actual loss ratios.
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It's just so far outside the consideration of most businesses that they don't seek policies that include piston-GA. The rates reflect other common modes of travel and specifically don't factor in the actuarial risk associated with employee-owned-piston-GA travel. They could, but the rates would be higher.

Most businesses perceive zero benefit from letting their people fly their own planes... so why bother? To allow that one guy to do it would require a policy and probably different insurance, so most companies will default to "nope!"
 
azpilot said:
My employer won't even let us use our own personal automobiles for work travel over a certain distance. I am in the Phoenix area. There is a guy in my department that has meetings in San Diego with a supplier frequently. Our new policy prohibits him from driving his personal vehicle to San Diego. It's a five hour drive from our building to theirs. He has to fly commercial or rent a car to get there. It's all about the insurance, and liability avoidance.
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I hate flying into SD. I need my own company airplane.
 
I have only done it once. It was a 45 minute one-way flight or about a 4 hour drive. Asked my boss who knows I'm a pilot. He okayed it. I charged gas on my company credit card. Filed the expense report and he approved it. I spent the morning working and the rest of the day flying. :D
 
When I flew for Blackwater, there was no policy against personal flying for business, and I actually flew to our Melbourne office a few times. Probably the real reason there was no policy was that Erik Prince used to fly his Maule into the Blackwater strip all the time.

When the aviation branch got sold to AAR, I flew to Moyok once for training. It was a last minute thing, I was in the middle of nowhere and it would have taken longer to get to the airport than my flight took. I asked the nice lady in accounting how I should file the expense report. She didn't know so she called AAR corporate. They told her it was expressly forbidden and that anyone doing so would be fired. She advised me to just list vehicle miles and keep quiet on the rest.

My current company isn't quite so draconian, however they still won't reimburse for POV in an aircraft. They will provide a rental car at your destination though. Most times the monetary difference is a wash.
 
My company owns a PA28, and I fly it on business 3 days per week. However, I also own the company
 
When I owned my own biz, flew as much as I could. When I ended up back in Fortune 500, expressly prohibited.
 
timwinters said:
I just formed my own company (again) and just had to sign an affidavit for my work comp carrier that I wouldn't use my airplane for business.

Not that I really care about that.
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Do they have a problem if you ride your motorcycle for business?
 
Our policy requires you include the company as a named insured (1M min).

For Reimbursement we mirror the federal travel regulations (FTR) and reimburse at the GSA rate.
 
I don't know if the company has a policy, but I know that a few pilots have flown their own airplane to the location of recurrent training. I believe they were reimbursed for the cost of the airline ticket or rental car the company would have provided. I know that's what happened the time I chose to drive my own car rather than have them rent one for me.
 
Rcmutz said:
When I worked for the DoD, we could be reimbursed on a per air mile basis, ONLY up to the cost of the airline ticket. If it cost you more, you were on your own. It still helped allow me to fly more often. Of course, trips beyond about 400 NMs were NOT cost effective.
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Yeah, we don't have a stipulation for "air mileage" since there isn't an IRS mileage rate that I'm aware of. Unless it was a last-minute flight booking, it's pretty difficult to come out ahead of the airlines financially for the locations I travel to, and for a few of the trips, I couldn't beat them door to door even with a 200kt bird.

TUL-FTW is about the only routine business flight I could probably win in regards to time and cost, assuming I owned my own aircraft. I'll just have to continue looking out the window and watching airline miles pile up!
 
Thanks for the link to the federal reimbursement rate for airplanes. We actually have a lot of policies in place because of our work with the federal government so that may work out to be a nice easy flat comparison to use.

We have had pilots before in our company and they have flown on business. It's just that because of insurance they would like to have a policy. I'm about 50/50 on whether or not it will be approved.

The other thing that I have going for me is we use commercial drones for some of our work, so with the pilot and currency requirements for that, I can hopefully tie them together.

I'm planning on submitting it for review early next week, so we'll see how it goes.
 
When I asked my supervisors about flying myself up to WY for a work assignment, their first response was , "Damn Chuck, if we let you do it, then everybody will want to" - which is hilarious since I'm the only pilot in the organization.

We settled on a routine auto-mileage reimbursement based on the Google maps least distance computation. The map miles round trip was 2400 or so, I flew 3000 nm ( side trip to Sedona ) and made a $300 profit ( direct costs plus hangar 5 nights ).
 
petrolero said:
Most businesses perceive zero benefit from letting their people fly their own planes... so why bother?
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Most businesses would be correct on this for most use cases. Too many times, pilots want to extend their hobby into business use, where the use simply isn't justified. Almost no ones time is that valuable. Big airport to big airport just doesn't make sense given cheap airfares, weather delays and distractions for GA fliers, and risk.

We had a consultant a few years back fly his airplane from Pittsburgh to No. Va. for a meeting with us. The weather was marginal. He was late getting there, was distracted checking the weather during the meeting, and cut the meeting short to leave early to "beat weather".

Keep your hobby a hobby.


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I'm in a unique position... I live in Bakersfield (central CA) and my most frequent travel destination for work is Yuma, AZ. It is a minimum of a 6-7 hour commitment via PHX to fly there commercially, along with the likely overbooking of one of the three daily flights, so I typically drive the 420ish miles at a cost of a day each way.

While my boss, his boss, and my HR manager agree that GA makes sense, we have hit a brick wall with the VP of HR who won't even entertain the idea.

Yet there is no prohibition on motorcycles.

So I sparingly use the plane on missions where it makes the most sense (flying to Carlsbad for a conference that required me to take my wife back to Bakersfield and do a quick turn and fly back to Long Beach for a trade show) and routine flights up to our factory where I keep an old car (our vacation spot is 15 miles from the factory)

I claim auto mileage. Most of the time I break even.


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I worked for a medium sized company for many years and was the only instrument-rated pilot who flew his own aircraft on business. I helped the company create a reimbursement policy for business travel by employee-owned GA airplane. We created a special aviation travel expense form, to be added to the standard expense report, which specified for each trip the origin and destination, date, and Hobbs hours flown. The company reimbursed the direct travel costs (gas, oil, landing/ramp/parking fees) for the flights, but I had to submit an annual "justification report" showing what the cost would have been had I taken the airlines (economy class) for comparison (and they had to be in the same ballpark). So this discouraged me from flying where the airlines would do a better/cheaper job. The company also required to be a named insured on my policy for an extra 1M liability.
Beyond this, I did an annual analysis of the percentage of business vs. personal flights, and used that to estimate the actual expense of ownership to be submitted to the IRS as a business deduction.
 
Rcmutz said:
When I worked for the DoD, we could be reimbursed on a per air mile basis, ONLY up to the cost of the airline ticket. If it cost you more, you were on your own. It still helped allow me to fly more often. Of course, trips beyond about 400 NMs were NOT cost effective.
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We just needed a sign off that POV use was "more advantageous" to the government. It never really was a hard justification. Of course, when they griped about it we'd do things like rent cars one way from APG to BWI (which was legitimate) but many times more expensive.
 
Originally Posted by paflyer \
Do they have a problem if you ride your motorcycle for business?

timwinters said:
Don't recall if they asked me if I owned one or not.
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That was a rhetorical question. Meaning it's a perception vs reality.
 
ggroves said:
Most businesses would be correct on this for most use cases. Too many times, pilots want to extend their hobby into business use, where the use simply isn't justified. Almost no ones time is that valuable. Big airport to big airport just doesn't make sense given cheap airfares, weather delays and distractions for GA fliers, and risk.

We had a consultant a few years back fly his airplane from Pittsburgh to No. Va. for a meeting with us. The weather was marginal. He was late getting there, was distracted checking the weather during the meeting, and cut the meeting short to leave early to "beat weather".

Keep your hobby a hobby.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
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There you have it, folks. One anecdote should set the policy. Maybe you address this activity the same way a stamp collector does with his, but many of us are much more serious and use it for transportation. Do you work for an airline, or are you a bean counter? Both?

I live near Philadelphia. If I need to go to, say, KBED Boston, it's a 6 hr drive (despite Google's optimistic estimate), the train is 6.5 scheduled just to Beantown- then you need to get out to Bedford by "T" or taxi or both, but Amtrak is never on time).

Taking the tube (a CRJ) to Boston is 1.5 scheduled- most of that time is taxiing to the runway. Add 3 hrs to drive to PHL, park, get naked, and wait, then deplane and get out of the terminal to a taxi or rental car, another hour, then drive to Bedford, another hour if you're lucky. Total is 6.5 hours if everything is on time - and you are on someone else's schedule.

Flying myself in benign conditions- (I leave and return when I'm good and ready and I don't have to get up at 3:30AM for a 7PM airline departure) is 45 min total to the airport, pre-flight, and takeoff. Car is parked at no cost in my hangar for as long as I'm gone, not $20 a day at PHL. Flight time in my spam can is 2.0. Land, park, and get out of the airport, 15 min max. So 2.5 hours door to door and I'll spend $175 for fuel- less than half the time of driving or mass transit and a whole lot more pleasant.

Going more than a few hundred miles, commercial makes more sense both in terms of time and cost. But there's plenty of 300nm trips to places an hour+ ground travel from a commercial airport where it is a break at worst and under half the time.

Maybe your time isn't worth much, but it's the only commodity that no one knows how much they have in the "bank."
 
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