Fly me to the moon

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I don't know about you, but I've found that traveling by airline is almost the worst way to travel. However, I travel  on commercial aircraft. You, if you are high up in the corporate pecking order, travel by private jet. There are differences in the two modes of travel. You can always get a non-stop flight; you control who flies with you. You probably get better food. And, you are not frisked by the TSA. So, it's not a bad deal flying by private jet.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent expose about the corporate executives penchant for using the company plane, especially to get to the executive's vacation home(s). The corporate fleet is used more than 30% of the time to fly the boss to his retreat. Joe Tucci, the head of EMC, used the company's jet almost twice a week to fly home in the period 2007 - 2010. Clearly, it's highly unlikely that Mr. Tucci, himself, flew home that many times, but that's what EMC reported. 

Companies have to assign a cost to the personal use of the jet. The cost assigned by most companies differed from that calculated by the Journal. EMC said it cost $664,079 to shuttle Mr. Tucci home; the Journal calculated the cost as $3,100,000. Leucadia National's personal jet costs in 2009 were $30,000 by the company's calculations, $708,000 by the Journal. At least one company, Nabors, has offices at both vacation homes of their CEO; so, of course, the personal cost of the company's jet is low.

To make matters worse, the FAA does not make the filings of the personal use of these companies public. The Journal had to use FIFA to get the data.