Sorry Harry,
But I couldn't work for or have anything to do with Walmart. The only way I would go into one of their stores is if I were forced at gunpoint. I don't trust anything that they do and I am sorry to hear that they have anything to do with aviation. Spook --- On Mon, 12/29/08, Harry L. Francis <[email protected]> wrote: From: Harry L. Francis <[email protected]> Subject: [ercoupe-flyin] Walmart Aviation To: [email protected] Date: Monday, December 29, 2008, 7:21 PM Though Wal-Mart could, in theory, save millions of dollars in annual operating expenses by downsizing a substantial portion of its fleet to VLJs, it has no plans to do so, choosing, instead, to maximize the efficiency of its Lears by maintaining a load factor of plus-five passengers per flight leg. “Our load factor is 5.2, so we really get incredible efficiency out of these airplanes,” Wal-Mart director of Global Travel Services Duane Futch said in an interview with Business Travel News. “We’re not just going out and dropping one person off. They always travel with a team that is going to do the job they have to do in the field. We don’t just drop that team off. That airplane is constantly moving. The typical Wal-Mart airplane will make between three and six stops a day: picking up people, dropping people off … moving them to another location.” As is the case with many commercial air-taxi operations, Wal-Mart’s fleet management needs are sufficiently complex to demand more than an off-the-shelf management solution to handle passenger, crew, maintenance, inspection and other scheduling and back-office tasks. Building on Atlanta-based Seagil Software’s BART aviation management system, WalMart programmers fashioned a series of custom application extensions maximizing efficiency while retaining the flexibility to quickly change everything from routings to passenger lists in response to unforeseen circumstances requiring immediate attention (a computer system meltdown at a remote division, for example.) Like many new-generation air-taxi operators, Wal-Mart Aviation also recognizes the importance of full-service, high-level ground services (think DayJets’ DayPorts). Not only does the company own and operate a private ATC tower at Rogers field, a wholly owned FBO at the airport, 22-year-old Beaver Lake Aviation, supplies everything from free popcorn to computerized weather tracking, executive conference rooms, crew quiet and snooze rooms, exercise facilities, washing machines and courtesy transportation to nearby restaurants. And if all this isn’t enough to convince skeptics that Wal-Mart Aviation is really just an air-taxi company in corporate clothing, consider this: The company traces its history back to 1954 when Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton bought a single-engine Ercoupe 415 and began flying it to stores in Arkansas and adjacent states because it was faster than driving between locations on twisting Ozark Mountain roads.
