The Economist June 11th 2022 Business 67T
he originalRorschach test involves
showing a series of ten inkblots to
someone, and asking them what images
they see. Although the test’s psycholog
ical validity is debatable, no one can
dispute its wild success as a metaphor: a
single object can mean very different
things to different people. In business a
prime example of Rorschachiness is the
corporate jet. Depending on your per
spective, it can signal untrammelled
greed, rational decisionmaking, post
pandemic work habits or the fight
against climate change.
Those who see excess regard the
company jet as the worst in a pile of
goldplated perks for overpaid exec
utives. While minions reacquaint them
selves with airport queues and the curse
of six hours next to the chatty stranger in
24 a, bosses skip the lines and travel in
luxury. It is difficult to remain grounded
in these circumstances. ey, a global
accounting firm, reportedly calls its
plane “eyOne”; on touchdown, auditors
doubtless fantasise about radioing that
“the eygle has landed”. If jets were used
only for work trips, that would be bad
enough. But more than half of the ceos
of a 500strong group of companies
monitored by Equilar, an analytics outfit,
made use of their firm’s jet for personal
purposes in 2020.
This view equates the company plane
with entitlement and waste. The bosses
of America’s big carmakers were excori
ated for using their jets to travel to Wash
ington, dc, to ask for a bailout during
the financial crisis in 2008. Disquiet
about his use of Credit Suisse’s private jet
was one reason why António Horta
Osório resigned as chairman of the Swiss
bank earlier in the year. When Jeff Im
melt, a former chief executive of ge,
travelled on the firm’s private plane, asecond one would sometimes follow him
around the world as backup. Mr Immelt’s
successor, John Flannery, made a point of
putting ge’s jets up for sale when he took
over in 2017. A research study from 2012
found that costconscious privateequity
firms reduced corporatejet fleets at firms
they had acquired.
If the corporatejet inkblot spells ex
cess to some, to others it represents hard
headed pragmatism. The personal safety
of top executives is one consideration:
private aircraft are a big part of Meta’s
outsized spending ($27m in 2021) on the
security of Mark Zuckerberg, its chief
executive. So is privacy: it is really hard to
finalise a secret takeover when there is a
stranger spilling pretzels on you. (Both of
these arguments are slightly weakened by
the scraping of airtraffic data that lets
people track specific aircraft; a paper
published last year described a machine
learning algorithm designed to predict
where a corporate jet is going to land while
it is still in the air.)
Above all, chief executives are busy
people. If boards would rather they spentmore time working and less time watch
ing someone repack their suitcase at the
security gates, that’s their call. And be
cause private jets can land on more
airfields than commercial airliners can,
they are often the only way for executives
to travel directly from headquarters to
factories and subsidiaries in less acces
sible locations. A paper published in 2018
by academics at Boston College and
Drexel University found that business
related flights of this kind improved
firms’ operational performance.
Some look at corporate jets and pri
marily see an enemy in the fight against
climate change. Because of the small
number of passengers on board, private
planes emit much more carbon per
passenger mile than commercial flights
do. Elon Musk, a cleantech tycoon who
is fast becoming a Rorschach test in his
own right, was pilloried recently when
his jet took a nineminute flight from
San Jose to San Francisco. Mr Musk is
also an outspoken critic of remote work,
which is another thing that private jets
bring to mind. The argument for using
them rests heavily on the importance of
inperson communication, something
that has become a lot more contentious
in the postpandemic workplace.
The point of the Rorschach test is that
it has no single right answer. Corporate
jets look unjustifiable to some and sen
sible to others. They can improve pro
ductivity or be a sign of an outofcontrol
ceo; the paper from 2018 found that
planes made more flights to resorts when
a firm’s boss had been in place for longer
and when it had dualclass shares. They
raise questions of fairness among critics
and spell efficiency to defenders. They
have become a useful shortcut for testing
someone’s gut instincts on management,
as well as for beating the queues. Emblem of greed or route to productivity: what do you see?BartlebyCorporate jet, Rorschach test
body. Capacity is ascending towards pre
covid levels, according to oag(see chart on
previous page). Willie Walsh, iata’s boss,
said in May that the speed of the rebound
meant that passenger numbers worldwide
would match figures from 2019 by 2023, a
year earlier than previously forecast.
The pace of the recovery has caught out
an industry that has been rebuilding at a
steady clip. In particular, traffic has be
come much more concentrated in peak pe
riods, according to aci Europe, a group
representing the region’s airports. Passen
ger numbers are already exceeding pre
pandemic levels in short spells in some
places. Airports, in particular, are strug
gling to cope with these peaks. Replacing
workers laid off during the pandemic is
tough amid tight labour markets, especial
ly so because of the extra security checks
required to hire airport staff. Swissport,
the world’s largest airportservice firm,
said in May that it needed to take on 30,000
new workers worldwide by the summer on
top of the 45,000 it now employs.
Staff shortages have already prevented
some airlines from adding even more ca
pacity to meet the surging demand. Continuing disruptions may deter passengers,
especially if the novelty of taking a holiday
in a faraway place wears off. Even if airlines
and airports are able to recruit staff to
make the summer months less painful,
other problems remain.
Foremost is a skyhigh oil price. Mr
Walsh said recently that surging fuel costs
had added 10% to fares already. Michael
O’Leary, the irrepressibly bouncy boss of
Ryanair, Europe’s biggest carrier, admits
only to “cautiousgrounds for optimism”. A
whitehot summercould be followed by a
difficult winter.n