Jay Palmer on the booming world of private jets; or why the emerging micro jet based air taxi services will improve Madison’s transportation options:

It used to be that if you wanted to use a private jet, the only choice was to go out and buy one, and that’s still the way that most of the 25,000 corporate aircraft in the U.S. are operated. Out-and-out ownership is still rising, but the biggest growth is coming elsewhere.
Aircraft charter activity, for instance, is booming. Todd Rome, president of Blue Star Jets, claims 350% annual growth in business since the company’s founding in 2001. Other schemes are also taking shape, particularly the idea of small “air taxis” that you could simply summon to a local airport for a quick hop at a reasonable rate.
Don Burr, founder of the erstwhile air pioneer People Express, and former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall have joined ranks to set up such a service in Connecticut and southern New York state, with plans to eventually expand down the Eastern seaboard. Finance permitting, Pogo, as the company will be named, will start next spring using a new breed of four-passenger “micro jets,” which are less expensive to manufacture and operate than traditional jets. Though a round-trip fare will be higher than a first-class commercial ticket, it will be far less than chartering a private jet.
But such deals remain small beer compared with the real action, which is in fractional ownership schemes — a form of time sharing at 30,000 feet. NetJets, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is easily the world’s biggest operator of business jets, with a fleet of than 535 planes, including some based in Europe and a small fleet in the Middle East. Its three big rivals are all owned by the major corporate jet builders, Bombardier’s FlexJet, Raytheon’s Flight Options and Textron’s CitationShares.

Now, if we could only get wireless internet access at the Dane County Airport (it is nearly 2005, after all).