I enjoy the runway view at airports -- watching large airliners line up on the runway, fire up their turbofan jet engines, and elegantly soar into the sky. Despite working in aviation, I still find myself in awe of the system that safely coordinates millions of takeoffs and landings each day around the world. However, as many travelers have unfortunately experienced, airline schedules aren't always as reliable as one might expect.

If you're an experienced traveler, you have undoubtedly experienced the culinary delights of specific cities or regions - like, say, Baltimore's crab cakes, San Antonio's burritos, New Orleans' Jambalaya, the Carolinas' sweet pork barbecue, Philadelphia's cheese steaks, or the summer succulence of Maine lobster.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

That concept (in an ...eggshell) has plagued transportation industry planners since someone got the idea that a new-fangled device called the wheel could be used for transportation.

For air taxi companies like mine, the question probably is better put this way: "What comes first, the passenger wanting to go somewhere that requires a plane, or a plane going somewhere that attracts a passenger?" 

With conventional airlines, the plane comes first. Then, if the people running the airline have done their homework and marketing right, the customers will come. Airline planners and schedulers study existing paths of commerce between any two cities on a map and make an educated guess about which two cities to connect with one or more of their planes. Then they go out and find the people who they believe have a need or desire to fly between those two cities, using a combination of price, advertising, service quality and differentiation, network opportunities and other inducements as their marketing tools.

It's understandable that almost no one pays attention to flight attendants’ pre-flight safety briefings and demonstrations. We’ve all seen it a hundred times before and we pretty much already know where the emergency exits are. And we’ve been buckling seat belts in cars and planes since we were toddlers, so those particular instructions seem trite.

I left the house one morning around 7:15, just after breakfast and returned home that evening around 6:30 for dinner with family.

Pretty normal, right?

Not if you knew what transpired during those 11-plus hours. And the story of that illustrates the value of my company, Linear Air, better than just about anything else I can tell you.

After leaving the house I drove a few minutes to Hanscom Field, in Bedford, MA, a western suburb of Boston. Not only am I the founder and CEO of Linear Air, the nation’s leading on-demand air taxi service, I’m also a pilot. And instead of flying Linear Air customers that day or working at my desk, I needed to make a multi-stop sales trip. So I flew myself in the Cirrus SR22 piston-engine aircraft that Linear Air uses as its management plane. (Our customers actually fly on one of our faster, higher-flying, longer-ranged Eclipse very light jets. But if that plane isn’t suitable for a shorter-range trip, we can book Linear Air passengers on Cirrus SR22 planes operated by our marketing partner Hopscotch Air. The Cirrus SR22 is the best and safest piston-engine plane ever built.)

Willie Sutton, famous as one of America’s most accomplished bank robbers during those portions of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s when he was not in jail for, what else, bank robbery, once was asked, “Willie, why do you rob banks?” His famous, and elegantly simple answer was, “That’s where the money is.”

We were right.

That’s the message I took from the recent announcement by a company that competed – at least in theory – with my company, Linear Air.  JetSuite is a private aviation company based at John Wayne Airport in affluent Orange County, California. It launched service about four years ago, flying four-passenger Embraer Phenom 100 jets in what it called, at the time, an air taxi service.

Eight-year-old Linear Air, based at Hanscom Field, in Bedford, Mass., outside Boston, and Westchester County Airport outside NYC, is an air taxi company too. And we have affiliates operating in the Southern California market and elsewhere throughout the country. But we operate a fleet of four-passenger Eclipse Very Light Jets, and Cirrus SR22 Technically Advanced props, not Phenoms. And that’s why Linear Air continues to operate as an air taxi while JetSuite is moving further into something closer to a conventional jet charter company.

Aviation is the safest mode of transportation. Full Stop.

Now, if you’ve been reading (and believing?) the headlines and newspaper stories, or listening to the breathless TV reports about the problems with Boeing’s cutting edge new widebody, the 787 Dreamliner, you might find my assertion about aviation safety to be incongruous. But as the sage philosopher, Bill Murray, so eloquently put it in the movie Stripes (filmed in my hometown of Louisville btw) “That’s the facts, Jack.”  That, and "Lighten up, Francis."

No company providing air transportation services acts or thinks cavalierly about safety. Not United or Delta, the world’s two largest airlines. Not AirSeychelles, which with two jets likes to bill itself as the world’s smallest airline. And certainly not my company, Linear Air, the nation’s most successful on-demand air taxi and jet charter company.