Greg Raiff, CEO of Private Jet Services in Hampton, N.H., recommends that owners give pilots performance reviews similar to those conducted by commercial airlines. Raiff would ask, for example, "Did you maximize the winds? Was there a better tailwind at 43,000 than at 41,000 feet, and did you use that? Why did you have both motors turning if you are number 71 in line for takeoff at JFK?"

Flying Caretakers
For hands-on owners, the ability to rely upon and incentivize a pilot is the first step to managing aircraft costs successfully. "I really believe that you can’t invest enough money in the people caring for your airplane," says Raiff, who employs a pilot who pushes a vacuum between flights to tidy up the plane. "You should find the best pilots out there—not some throttle jockey who can land on a postage stamp, but someone who thinks of himself as a caretaker for your asset," he says. "The best crew can save you a ton of money on fuel burn, on dispatch costs, even cleaning costs." His pilot spends entire Saturdays detailing his own car with cloth diapers. "That’s the guy you want taking care of your $30 million asset. So what if you have to pay him an extra $8,000 a year?" Raiff says.

Ferraro employs a dedicated mechanic who follows his jets through their comprehensive inspections and keeps them immaculate between flights. "With the fractional companies, you get on the plane, and if a light bulb is out in the cabin, nobody cares. But my plane is always impeccably clean. There are no squawks of any kind. The maintenance guy handles everything," Ferraro says.

Both convenience and vanity drive Ferraro’s strategy, but he also gains a financial advantage by paying an additional employee in his flight department. A jet requires at least some tweaking after each use. Air pressure in the tires must be adjusted; exhaust residue must be buffed off the exterior. "If you don’t hire a mechanic to do that, you’ll pay your FBO to do it at $200 an hour," says aircraft manager Gil Wollin of TAG Aviation in San Francisco.

Dedicated mechanics can also take care of small repairs before they become major hassles. For example, if a jet’s lavatory develops a leak, the owner has a choice: He can fix the leak, or he can remove the lavatory and the floorboards to make sure that none of that highly corrosive blue liquid has seeped into the body of the plane. "The second option costs more now, but it may save you hundreds of thousands of dollars later if the leak does structural damage to the aircraft," Cerretani says.

The going rate for mechanics varies, depending on plane type and level of experience. According to Wollin, owners of large-body jets such as a Challenger or Gulfstream can expect to pay an experienced, full-time mechanic between $85,000 and $95,000 per year. For smaller jets, such as a Citation, the going rate is $65,000 to $75,000 per year.

The mechanic’s cost-control role involves the crucial task of evaluating the bills submitted by companies performing maintenance. Even large aircraft charter and management companies are beginning to audit these bills for mistakes. TAG Aviation manages more than 180 aircraft worldwide, and last year, as an experiment, decided to ask managers to audit every maintenance bill they received for every aircraft, Wollin says. These audits, which are now mandatory, have achieved, on average, a 25 percent reduction in maintenance expenses. Most of the mistakes TAG managers found involved simple errors, such as overtime charges for several hours of work that were actually completed before overtime charges would have applied. But in one costly instance, maintenance engineers removed and stored the fuel from an aircraft prior to inspection, a standard procedure, but then charged the owner a premium per-gallon rate for that same fuel when they put it back in the aircraft. This inflated the bill by about $5,000. Generally, these charges are not examples of fraud, but mere oversights. However, owners almost invariably end up paying unless they ask an expert to question the bills.