Contributor - Business Aviation

Dale Smith

In 2015, not long after being promoted to the director of aviation for a Fortune 100 tech giant, Bas de Bruijn (now lead G550 captain and the head of aviation advisory services for Clay Lacy Aviation) was confident that he had “all the answers” to any question about operating a global flight department.
“I had a deep background in international flight operations. I knew everything about our airplanes and how many hours they flew. I knew how to hire pilots and crews. I knew how to create a budget,” de Bruijn said. “Then, not long after a larger corporation acquired our company, the CFO asked me what the ROI was on our aircraft.”
“I struggled to give him a good answer,” he continued. “I found that while I knew business aviation, I was not very well versed in the languages of the board and C-suite. It made me a bit insecure.”
De Bruijn added that he could comfortably share the benefits of saving time, security, safety, convenience, and all the other paybacks that business aviation had been built on; none ever fully answered the “we need to make a case for every dollar we spend” ROI question. And knowing that the new parent company’s culture was strong on justifying expenditures, he knew the question wouldn’t go away.
So, faced with that never-ending prospect, de Bruijn decided to gain the knowledge he needed by earning an executive MBA at Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands, his home country.
“I devoted every class in the program to corporate aviation,” he explained. “How could I apply corporate finance, human resources, strategic management, and leadership principles to corporate aviation? No one had ever done it before.”
And he was quick to find out why. In fact, when he asked the professor leading his corporate finance class about how he could determine the ROI for business aviation, the instructor’s answer was, “You can’t. Because they are intangible benefits, you can’t put a dollar sign on them.”
“He was right. But one of my other professors, Dr. Bas Kodden, put me on a different path,” de Bruijn said. “I had to look at it from the point of view of what the use of the business aircraft does for the people in the back of the airplane? That’s what it’s all about.”
<h2>Redefining the Value of Business Aviation</h2>
De Bruijn said the realization was like flipping a switch and seeing business aviation in a whole new light.
“In business aviation, how did we always overlook the human element in the value equation? How does having access to an airplane affect people’s well-being?” he said. “The focus had always been on the cost side. We needed to shift from basing the aircraft’s ‘worth’ on shareholder value to one based on stakeholder value—and the most important stakeholders in a company are its employees.”
Two tools de Bruijn used to develop his new “ROI value scale” were the Job Demand-Resources (JD-R) and the Person-Environment Fit (PE-Fit) models. In addition, he used material he found in a proposed research framework titled “The Business Travel Stress Model.”
“What that early research showed me was that business travel stress isn’t really about hitting some magic number of trips,” he said. “It’s the accumulated wear of business travel itself, and it gets more pronounced when people are crossing multiple time zones on a frequent basis.”
De Bruijn added that, in his research, the JD-R model further explains the dynamic relationship between job demands, resources, and a person’s well-being, which, in many instances, can cause significant stress, leading to emotional exhaustion and burnout.
By using the two models to define the three primary areas of stress facing business travelers—Pre-Trip, During Trip, and Post-Trip—de Bruijn was able to collect insights from frequent travelers on how the availability and non-availability of business aircraft affected each person’s ability to mitigate the various stress factors.
“I used that to develop a framework and then was able to interview a variety of different managers at different levels within our company,” he explained. “From that, I created a qualitative research study based on the analysis of those transcripts.”
<h2>Moving Away from Bottom Line</h2>
De Bruijn said findings from his studies suggest that access to a corporate aircraft may help mitigate business travelers’ stress and work-family conflicts, potentially enhancing overall well-being.
In addition, participants in the study emphasized their relief from time pressures and greater control over their travel schedules, highlighting the tangible benefits of the familiar, private environment of the company’s airplane.
As an added benefit, they also shared their personal feelings of “privilege, motivation, and organizational connection,” suggesting that the positive psychological effects of having access to a corporate aircraft may extend beyond stress reduction to strengthening an employee’s ties to the company and aiding in the retention of these key individuals.
“I think we need to change the conversation and move these aircraft from logistics tools and reframe them as human capital tools,” de Bruijn said. “You need to look at more than hours flown and the costs and start having the conversation about people and the airplane’s impact and making their jobs and lives easier.”
“We have to ask, ‘Is there an opportunity for people to start using the aircraft that currently cannot, and what benefits would that access bring?’” he continued. “I would argue that if you have some key personnel who travel a significant amount of time, there’s likely a very good case for them to have some access to the company aircraft.”
De Bruijn said that his own flight department (and the way it used its aircraft) was a textbook example of unfulfilled opportunities.
“After the university accepted my master’s thesis, I shared my final findings with our company executives along with some suggested changes we should make in our operation,” he said. “It was very well received because it provided demonstrable benefits. At the time, we weren’t flying enough, and that made making a case for a positive bottom line very difficult.”
One thing he highlighted was how the company’s then-current requirements for aircraft use worked against the value the aircraft could deliver. A case in point was when the company’s team was traveling to a supplier meeting in Silicon Valley: two executives flew on the company jet, while the rest of the team took a commercial flight.
“That’s not cost-effective and the wrong way to look at what value an airplane can deliver,” de Bruijn said. “The airplane is going anyway, so just put everyone on it.”
“What I proposed was to expand the authorization base of who could use the airplanes,” he continued. “Allowing more people to have access to the aircraft increased our load factors and seat hours on each flight, which enhanced the collaboration and internal alignment among our team members. It redefined how we operated.”
<h2>Preparing for the Question before It Gets Asked</h2>
Instead of waiting for someone from the leadership team to ask about the flight department’s ROI, de Bruijn shared some thoughts on how you can take a proactive role in becoming your flight department’s “value” ambassador.
“Be prepared to propose how you can make a value proposition around the flight department. But first, you need to be in tune with the company’s near-term business goals, so talk to your executives. You can’t be working in a silo,” he said. “Are there any active mergers or acquisitions, or expansion activities that will require frequent trips to new locations? Not everyone is privy to that kind of information. So, tell your executives what you are trying to accomplish.”
Further, think broadly, he advised. “Find new ways that the aircraft can be leveraged for significant advantages. Matching the goals of the company to how the aircraft can be used is something none of the aviation schools teach—but they should,” de Bruijn said.
Discussions at flight departments tend to center on costs and the balance sheet, he continued. “Remember, cost is loud, but value is quiet,” de Bruijn said. “That’s the wrong way to look at it. The real-people-value side of it isn’t highlighted enough in business aviation. That’s what directors of aviation need to present when they talk to the principals during budget reviews. It’s a discussion we must have and the change in thinking we need to promote.”
While de Bruijn feels his master’s thesis (which was revised with co-authors A. Oosterhoff and B. Kodden, and published as a peer-reviewed article in the 2026 edition of the Journal of Air Transport Management) is a solid start toward reshaping how companies make a sustainable case for their aircraft’s value and ROI, his work is just beginning.
“The research is now qualitative and exploratory, so it’s indicative rather than conclusive,” he said. “We have a broader, more qualitative study underway now, and I hope to get more executives from more companies involved. The more data we have, the stronger a value case we can build.”
De Bruijn said that to continue expanding his data, he needs to hear from the executives and key personnel whose travel the research is really about. “Their experience is the data,” he said. To take part in the study, visit <a href="https://flyingfit.limesurvey.net/FlyingFit?lang=en&amp;newtest=Y" target="_blank">https://flyingfit.limesurvey.net/FlyingFit?lang=en&amp;newtest=Y</a>

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