Corporate Aviation Management

3. The Functions and Development of the Corporate Aviation Manager

3 The Functions and Development of the Corporate Aviation Manager This chapter examines how corporate aviation managers deal with human and technical relationships day-by-day and how they can manage those relationships to achieve desired results. It also offers information on the skills required and provides ideas on how to obtain education and training for the development of corporate aviation managers. THE CORPORATE AVIATION MANAGER The manager has broad authority and responsibility for supervising all phases of the aviation department, including flight operations, maintenance, and scheduling. A corporate aviation manager must have an understanding of his or her department functions and the management skills required to get work accomplished by coordinating the efforts ofindividuals in his/her operation . Conununication skills are required to instill vitality into planning, organizing , controlling" and implementing. Effective overall management, 111 a word, requires a variety ofskills on the p~rt of the manager. 38 Part One: Role, Development, and Function MANAGING PEOPLE Management is a people-oriented discipline. The involvement with the employment and service to people makes management a dynamic study. Management cannot be explained with a simple doctrine. Management can be defined as the art and science of controlling human effort and resources to attain a desired objective in a specific corporate environment. One author, Franklin Moore, in his book, Management Organization and Practice, sees a manager's role this way: Everybody knows that a manager doesn't do much. That is, except to decide what is to be don~, to tell somebody to do it, to listen to reasons why it should not be done, why it should be done by somebody else, or why it should be done differently; except to follow up to see ifthe thing has been done, to discover that it has not been done, to listen to excuses from the person who should have done it; except to follow up a second time to see if the thing has been done, to discover that it has not been done, to wonder ifit is not time to get rid ofa person who cannot do a thing correctly, to reflect that the person at fault has a family with seven children; except to consider how much simpler and better the thing would have been done had they done it themselves in the first place. THE REQUIRED SKILLS OF A MANAGER Like any other department in a company, the aviation department has to have a manager, or someone in charge, to put management functions into practice. To achieve the maximum safety and efficiency of a department or operation, the person in charge should have at least minimal expertise in the basic skills of management and know how to apply those skills to benefit the department. The quality and efficiency ofa corporate aviation department are usually evaluated by the convenience and comfort it can provide for corporate executives. As long as take offS and landings are smooth and relatively on time, passengers and management assume that the most important activities of the operation such as safety, maintenance, training, passenger service, and cost control are also present. Completion of a flight and safe transport of passengers to their destination are only the end results of activities required to make the flight operation successful. Corporate Aviation Manager 39 The need to increase employee productivity and maintain flexible travel schedules necessitated the expansion of corporate aviation. Costs of purchasing, maintaining, and operating aircraft have accelerated. These factors and the advent ofjet aircraft have precipitated a need for the development of certain basic principles of corporate aviation management. Corporate aviation was traditionally managed according to a collection of fragmented methods developed by practitioners of more general aspects of management. The individual in charge of the aviation department applied his or her own management skills based on past experience, rather than according to a specific principle or plan. Consequently, methods varied extensively from operation to operation, and every corporation had its own philosophy concerning how to use and nlanage aircraft. What corporate aviation management apparently lacked was a unified, systematic approach and plan to manage the aviation department, according to prescribed management methods. A case in point to support the unified approach is the situation in which a company chooses to engage an airplane operation management company. This type of company usually operates all the airplanes with one management method (i.e., administration, record keeping, training, maintenance , etc.). There may be some differences...