Travel by private jet may seem like extravagant luxury to many but to several Bermuda international companies it is a practical and efficient means of travel.Flagstone Re is one such firm. Last week, chief executive officer David Brown and a team of employees went down to the Flagstone office in Puerto Rico and then on to some meetings in Trinidad.They travelled down to the Caribbean in a Falcon 900 jet with Longtail Aviation International Ltd, a private jet operator based at Bermuda’s LF Wade International Airport. Longtail invited The Royal Gazette along for the ride to wtness first-hand this convenient form of travel.The Flagstone team left at 8.30am on Wednesday morning and were sitting down to talk with their colleagues in San Juan before midday.After lunch on the US island, they headed back to the airport, hopped back on the jet for the one-and-a-half hour flight to Trinidad.Meetings in rainy Port of Spain finished on Thursday afternoon, about an hour earlier than expected. The flight was brought forward and the team returned to the airport, where they boarded the Falcon for the three-and-a-half hour flight back to Bermuda.By the time the plane touched down at about 7.30pm, the team had been away for less than 36 hours.“If we had flown commercially, this trip would have taken the best part of a week,” Mr Brown said.“This way we can do it in two working days and with just one night away from home. We’re making a big saving on executives’ time and that is significant to us.“Also we can do business on the flight and have meetings. You couldn’t do that on American Airlines.”The time savings were apparent from the point of arriving at the airport in Bermuda. All the same forms had to be filled in and passports shown, but there was no need to check in early. Getting there 10 minutes before flight time was perfectly adequate. There was no need to worry about connecting flights, as the plane flew direct to each destination. For all three legs of the Bermuda-Puerto Rico-Trinidad trip, there were no direct commercial flights available.Mr Brown’s claim that the trip would have taken about a week flying commercially was borne out by a quick internet search for commercial flight options for next Wednesday and Thursday.The speediest option for the Bermuda-San Juan leg next Wednesday was seven hours, 26 minutes, arriving at 10.26pm. Alternatively, one could leave at 8.55am and get to San Juan by 6.05pm, going via New York and Miami.San Juan to Port of Spain is another time-consuming trip. The search threw up one option leaving at 6.49am and arriving in Trinidad at 4.13pm; and another option leaving at 5.44pm and arriving the following day at 11.20am, entailing stops in Panama City and Caracas.Flying back from Trinidad on American Airlines, perhaps the best option available, would have meant leaving Port of Spain at 7.40am and going via Miami to Bermuda, arriving back on the Island at 8.15 pm another full day of travelling.In sum, it would have been virtually impossible to hold the business meetings and do the travelling in anything less than four working days and that would have been a stretch.The time-saving factor is of particular importance to Flagstone, which, since it began life as Class of 2005 Bermuda start-up re/insurer, has created a global platform with offices in far-flung corners of the world, including Switzerland, Luxembourg, London, New York, Puerto Rico, the Cayman Islands, Canada, Dubai, Brazil, India and South Africa.Mr Brown, who is based in Bermuda, says that flying with Longtail means that a business trip to the Switzerland, Dubai and India operations could feasibly be done in a week, saving many executive hours, not to mention hassle. “If I’m going to a single location and staying for a week, I’d probably fly commercially,” Mr Brown said. “But if I’m going to multiple locations on a tight schedule, then the corporate jet is much better.”Longtail was set up in 1999 by former Flagstone executive chairman Mark Byrne, himself a qualified pilot. The company has offices in Martigny, Switzerland and Halifax, Nova Scotia, as well as its headquarters at the Longtail Hangar in Southside, St. David’s.Flying the Falcon last week was Marty Amick, Longtail’s director of flight operations. Alongside him in the cockpit was Butch Lowe. Mr Amick has been flying planes for 43 years, since he learned the skill in a Cessna 150 at the age of 16. His experience includes a spell with Northwest Airlink.“This aircraft is better equipped than the average commercial airliner,” Mr Amick said during the two hours, 16 minutes flight to San Juan. There is certainly plenty of redundancy built into the Falcon’s hi-tech cockpit. The jet has two main computers, and five navigational systems, two of which operate on global positioning satellite technology (GPS). He estimated that Longtail had between 30 and 40 clients in Bermuda, corporations and high net worth individuals, who travelled with varying frequency. The economic downturn had impacted Longtail in various ways, he added.“Certainly some companies have cut back on travel, but there are others who have increased their flying,” Mr Amick said. “Some people may think of flying by corporate jet as a luxury, but for many businesses, it’s economically efficient and a business tool for increasing productivity.“Another impact is that because of the global economic climate, the market value of aircraft has dropped by something like 40 or 50 percent. So it’s a great time to buy a plane right now.”While Bermuda is a very popular world register for aircraft, Longtail is the only company to have Bermuda-registered aircraft on the Island. When it started operating 12 years ago it became the first company in 40 years to get an operating licence from the Bermuda Department of Civil Aviation. The flight operations inspector from the Department, Peter Adhemar, travelled on last week’s flights to ensure that Longtail was complying with all regulatory standards. He said that Bermuda embraced the move towards proactive safety measures.What that means for Longtail crew members is regular training in simulated circumstances, when something goes wrong and they have to deal with it. In 2008, Longtail earned the Platinum rating the highest-level safety audit rating awarded in the private aviation from Aviation Research Group/US Inc, the top specialised aviation information research and analytics body.Most things to go wrong on aircraft these days are not related to equipment malfunction, but rather to human error, Mr Amick said. The importance of human resource management in aircraft safety was something that regulators in Europe, as well as Bermuda and Cayman, understood better than the US, he added.Longtail has two Falcon 900s, which can accommodate a dozen passengers, and a Clifford Citation S/II light jet.The most popular destinations for clients are the Cayman Islands and London, though Longtail has also flown on several occasions to countries including Germany, Switzerland, Dubai, Jordan and India. Some of the Island’s publicity-shy, wealthy part-time residents use private planes to come and go with the minimum of visibility, while some families may hire a plane to go on vacation, skiing or on a trip to one of the more luxurious Caribbean destinations.For more information, see the Longtail website at www.longtailaviation.bm.