Birmingham to Upstate South Carolina in 1 h 02 m

The industry is organised around campuses that are hours apart by road and awkward by air. Engineers making that trip weekly are the clearest case in business aviation for flying rather than driving. Birmingham to Upstate South Carolina is 239 nautical miles of it, and 5 h 14 m by car in conditions that rarely hold.

Wheels up at 07 45 puts you on site in Upstate South Carolina by 10 17, with 7 h 11 m on the ground before the aircraft goes back. Home by 18 30. That is about as easy as a there-and-back day gets — no hotel, no overnight bag, and no second day of anyone's time.

The realistic alternative here is driving, and 5 h 14 m each way is the sort of number that gets quietly accepted until someone adds it up. Two of those in a day is most of a working day spent in a car, arriving for the meeting already tired. The scheduled-airline option on a pair this length is usually worse rather than better once you count the drive to the airport, the screening queue, and the connection a route this short often requires.

Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport and Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport are both business-aviation fields with private terminals, so the ten-minutes-before-departure arrival holds at each end.

One type, learned properly. We place this leg with a Part 135 operator we already know on the Vision Jet, in an aircraft carrying CAPS — a parachute over the entire airframe — and a one-button emergency autoland any passenger can use. For a company putting four people on one aircraft, those are the specifications that matter.