Aircraft Acquisition Expert or going Solo?

                                 Poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot, circa 1920. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

How hard can it be to buy a plane in the internet age?  Everyone now has access to information at their finger tips.  Perhaps this excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s essay “The Perfect Critic” for the literary journal Athenaeum in 1920 will shed some light on the subject.

The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.

Mr. Eliot would be amazed at the information overload of our times!

Hiring a dedicated and knowledgeable third party acquisition expert is sound business.  Similar to any other specialist that we use everyday, they know the landscape and are a valuable asset to the purchase.

Mike McCracken

President

Hawkeye Aircraft Acquisitions

Hawkeye Aircraft

Does Complying with the Aviation Alphabet Soup make you any SAFER?

Does complying with the aviation alphabet soup make you any safer?   

Where are you as an organization with your safety and best practices?  You have done your SMS, perhaps you have completed your IS-BAO process or gone through the processes, just not the audit—Are you any safer? 

Everyone’s goal is to have a flight department that meets the highest standards of safety.  The challenge is how to accomplish this and check yourself?  One approach is the traditional audit, which will give you a snapshot in time for one standard.  We feel the next step is to use a scenario based workshop to work together to build on the current foundation, compare industry standards and practices with your department, and work as a team to come up with ways of continuing self-improvement.  One step past a checklist.

Aviation safety is born out of best practices and adopting them and living them every day.  There are multiple ways to accomplish the same end result.  By taking what is working and building on those fundamentals, the flight department can become better at what they do. 

True professionalism is always looking at how to make things better in the future.  It takes each person in your organization to take responsibility to work on their individual shortcomings with a combination of the whole organization looking at preventing small errors by always working on eliminating them. 

Dr. Tony Kern in his book “Blue Threat” discusses that accepting “to err is human” is tempting fate for consequences that would be life threatening to you, those around you and your organization.  Good enough is not acceptable in our world.  First, we need to recognize there are gaps in what each of us does.  Encouraging individuals to look for their gaps, and then as a team, learn to be aware of gaps that can be fixed is what continuous improvement is all about.

Society expects that new checklists/procedures will fix the problem.  But why do we still have accidents with checklists and procedures that were designed to prevent the accident?  The goal of the workshop is to help you look at issues with different points of view and then encourage you to internalize what will make you better into your own personal performance.  The final results are a team that functions better and is vigilant for gaps in performance that lead to errors.

Please check out our web site or contact us for more information on our Safety and Best Practices Workshops.

Mike McCracken

President

Hawkeye Aircraft Acquisitions

Hawkeye Aircraft

ROI of Buying a Business Aircraft

Business metrics are an important part of effectively managing a business.  It goes beyond the basics of costs, revenues and profits.  One such calculation is return on investment or ROI.

ROI has many uses and can be applied to both invested capital as well as investments in human capital.  The capital of the brand, people, and productivity are hard to calculate, however that does not make them any less real. 

ROI also exists in the buying and selling of aircraft.  Most people would not think of buying a multiple million-dollar asset without enlisting the help of experts.  Most often those experts come from outside the company as the cost benefit or ROI of maintaining that expertise in-house is not attractive. 

What we have seen in the aviation industry is that more and more people are realizing that the cost of hiring an expert is far less than their own in-house ROI.  They do the same for their commercial real estate, or in house counsel who relies on outside legal experts in matters they do not do day in and day out.  Simply put, unless your business is in the buying and selling of aircraft, your human capital resources are best utilized in other more productive portions of the business.  Executives running the day to day business and flight departments managing the complexity of operations with a focus on safety.

Any business executive knows there is more than just looking at the numbers.  What makes you successful is the interpretation of the facts and applying them to retain the best results.  The internet has made information on aircraft more readily available, but the devil is in the details of understanding and properly applying the data.

Over the past 30+ years I have seen or heard of various executives and flight departments think they knew all of the answers and make costly mistakes.  From buying the wrong plane for the wrong reasons, or buying a “deal” that really wasn’t a deal, or not finding out the real market on the new plane.  We have all heard of the story of buying planes without an adequate pre buy to find out at the next inspection that they need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At this point, I am sure that some are saying, well that won’t happen to me, or our company.   I suggest one of two things, you have been extremely lucky or you have more than likely invested too many resources in an activity that you do not do enough and the results are a ROI that you would never accept in your business.   

Mike McCracken
President
Hawkeye Aircraft Acquisitions
Office 727 796 0903
info@hawkeye-aircraft.com
www.hawkeye-aircraft.com
"See the Difference"

Private Aviation versus Business Aviation--What is the Difference?

These are two terms that used interchangeably however they should not be.  While they look the same they are different.

Private Aviation is transporting passengers on private aircraft for either business or pleasure.  Generally, private aviation is a very broad reaching term.  Business aviation is much more narrowly defined.  It is using the same private aircraft but the flights and purpose are for business use.

This might sound like semantics to some, however it is an important distinction.   Why is it important?  The lack of distinguishing the two leads to the many erroneous comments by the press and politicians about ALL private aircraft.   It becomes guilt by association.

Lets take a couple of examples.  First, lets start with the President.  Air Force One is the most visible private aircraft in the world.  It can be used both for business and for personal flights.  A flight to meet a world leader to discuss an important trade agreement is a business trip.  A trip to South Florida to play golf with friends is a private aviation event.  Same plane, two different events.  (While there is an argument that can be made for security purposes and therefore even the golfing trip is business, the ultimate purpose is different.)

I own a small single engine Cirrus.  I use the plane for business use and for personal use.  You might see my plane on a ramp for a ballgame and assume wrongly that it was flown as a pseudo business trip.  But yet, not one dime of that trip is written off.  The same happens on larger planes with SIFL and entertainment tax rules. 

There are many companies that use the aircraft for only business use and do not allow any personal flights of any nature.  By tax code, those who do use some personal flying have to account for that in their taxes and if a public company, that must be reported as income on the SEC filings. 

Assuming that planes flown to special events are just for the rich and famous and they are getting subsidized on their taxes is not correct.  Sure there are some people who have made it to the big time and use their aircraft mainly for personal private aviation uses.  That is the beauty of America, that you can spend your money on things that make your life more convenient.  How their tax structure for the plane is handled is way different than how the masses are led to believe. 

So as an industry, we need to do more to help the masses understand that just because it looks the same, it is very different.  Perhaps we need to be honest with ourselves and admit that there is a mix, just like there is a mix for the President.

Mike McCracken

President

Hawkeye Aircraft Acquisitions

Office 727 796 0903

info@hawkeye-aircraft.com

www.hawkeye-aircraft.com

"Jets without Regrets"