Up Front: October 2011

Providing you with the best information available on business jet travel is by far our most important goal here at BJT. As we work our way through meeting after meeting, draft after draft and plan after plan, what motivates us is helping you get the most out of private air transport. Therefore, we struggle daily with decisions about who belongs on our cover (is this person relevant enough?), which vacation destinations to spotlight (is this somewhere the BJT reader will want to visit?) and which topics to focus on (does the business jet ­traveler care about this?).

It didn't take us long to conclude that you'd be interested in the current issue's cover story: the results from BJT's first survey of our readers' private air travel preferences. But to proceed with this particular feature, we needed to count not only on your interest but on your participation. Our readers tend to be fast-paced people with little time to spare. Would you devote 20 minutes to filling out a survey from BJT? We thought long and hard about that–and then spent months promoting the project on our Web site, via email, in the magazine and through the mail. The result: nearly a thousand of you rose to the occasion, detailing your likes, dislikes and experiences regarding ­everything from aircraft models to fractional shares to charter companies.

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who ­participated, and we look forward to ­hearing from even more of you next year. By the way, we provided a place in the survey for readers to write in their comments about flying ­privately, and many of the ­responses are poignant. My favorite is the one from a subscriber who simply wrote: "NOTHING BETTER."