Las Vegas by Mid-Morning, San Jose by Dinner

Retail and consumer goods run on the buyer's calendar. Line reviews, category meetings, and vendor summits are scheduled by the customer, and being unable to make the window is a commercial problem. The San Jose–Las Vegas pair is a clean example: 338 nm apart, and awkward by every scheduled option.

Leave at 07 15, on site by 09 36, and the aircraft waits while you work. 6 h 33 m on the ground is a full session, and you are home by 18 30. The hotel night, the second working day, and the evening away all come off the cost of the trip — which is usually where the real money was.

Both ends of this pair have hub airline service, so there is a nonstop and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What the nonstop does not give you is the hour before it: the drive to the main terminal, the screening queue, the gate, and a departure time chosen months ago by a network planner. Door to door, the private version usually saves two to three hours in each direction — and it saves them at the ends of the day, where they are worth the most.

Both Norman Y. Mineta San José International Airport and Henderson Executive Airport are straightforward fields for this aircraft with margin in hand, which matters more than it sounds: routine pairs are the ones that dispatch reliably, and reliability is most of what a business traveller is actually buying.

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.