As corporate flight departments shake their heads over the furor created by U.S. auto executives flying in corporate jets to Washington, D.C., support for business aviation came this week from an unusual source: The Warbird Beer Show.
Internet radio talk show hosts Dave Holmes and Greg Muir usually get more kudos for their banter than anything else. “Sidney and Scratch,” hosts of The Warbird Beer Show, are known for covering all types of aviation and space stories, usually with an ample dose of humor.
A recent show, however, featured a serious segment on the true value of business aviation. Regarding the “business jet furor,” Holmes said, “Business jets are tools and not toys. They’re not frivolous assets that need to be parked.”
Clearly understanding how business aviation reduces travel time waste, co-host Muir asked, “What does it cost per minute to run that business?”
Holmes pointed out the “complete nonsense” of “looking bad” by showing up in a jet. “Congress should focus on the actual problem, not on the distraction of how people showed up to the meeting,” he said.
Holmes dismissed the inappropriate mainstream media focus on business aviation as “ridiculousness.”
According to Holmes, his show on Flight Line Internet Radio has been a good vehicle to entertain audiences, and also to occasionally educate.
“Greg and I aren’t young guys,” he said. “We’ve been around the patch and seen enough that sometimes we just have to get serious. The show is fun, but if we have a chance to remind people of reality, that is okay, too. We talk directly to people who are about the topic, which is great.”
Starting in September 2008, Flight Line Internet Radio is a 24/7/365 streaming Internet radio station targeted at the global aviation community. In its first 11 weeks of broadcasting, the station accumulated more than 40,000 unique listeners and is growing at an average of 1,000 new listeners per day, according to co-founder Don Costanza.
He attributes the station’s popularity to the focused attention it gives to its listener’s passion.
“Aviation people really love being able to think about airplanes all the time,” he said. “It’s amazing that we have been able to give them something to latch onto like this. We’re actually quite humbled by the success.”
General Aviation News also contributes to Flight Line Internet Radio, with staff reporter Meg Godlewski bringing several stories each week to the radio broadcasts.
The Warbird Beer Show can be heard daily at FlightLineInternetRadio.com as well as from its home page, Warbirdbeershow.com.
I’ve been a Pilot since 1966 and have flown over 15,000 hrs as a GA Pilot. For 12 years I worked as a Manufacturing Manager with 5 Plants which I visited monthly with my staff. This resulted in excellent relationships with both salary and hourly workers. The net result of this efficiency was profitability in our operation in addition to winning 9 efforts to unionization.
Congress is not the authorization group to dictate how a company need to operate. Perhaps we need to determine how effective they spend their time and the Taxpayers money that include their pay.