Marc Dulude loves it when, after showing up at the far-flung offices of a company he’s thinking of buying, his eager-to-please hosts ask him how much time they’ve got to make their case before they have to get him back to the airport. “Don’t worry about that,” he replies. “We’ll take as much time as this needs.”

There aren’t many business travelers who get to say that every time they fly in for a meeting. Certainly not airline passengers. Chartering a plane or even owning a share of one won’t always do the trick, either—a fellow charterer or share-owner probably has the aircraft spoken for after your scheduled return. And even if the aircraft is available for an extra while, the flight crew may not be.

No, if you want complete freedom from aircraft schedules, you’ve pretty much got to own that sucker, and fly it yourself. That’s what Dulude does. A former CEO of Framingham, MA, plastics manufacturing design firm Moldflow who has also run software companies, Dulude is now a partner at Wellesley-based Ampersand Ventures. He specializes in buy-outs for the high-tech VC firm, where his portfolio companies have included information retrieval firm Endeca Software in Cambridge, biotech imaging specialist RadPharm in Princeton, and medical packaging system manufacturer Kortec in Ipswich. The need to check out existing and prospective investments has him constantly visiting companies all over the U.S. and Canada. To get the most out of his travel time, Dulude tools around in a Piper Mirage, a small propeller plane.

What, no jet? Don’t feel sorry for Dulude. It’s true, most privately piloted propeller planes are cramped four-seaters that top out around 140 mph or so, and tend to be either grounded or tossed around by any bad weather along the flight path. Dulude started off with one of those—a Cessna Skylane—when he got his license in 2001, thinking his flying would be strictly personal. But then he upgraded to the roomy six-seat Mirage, and had its piston engine replaced with a 560-horsepower turbine engine, essentially a jet engine that turns a propeller. Because the Mirage is pressurized, and because, unlike piston engines, turbine engines don’t lose power in the thinner air at altitude, it comfortably flies in the same 20,000-feet and up, above-the-bad-weather flight levels as jets. At 300 mph, the Mirage isn’t much slower than a business jet, either. That sort of aircraft can set you back 1.5 million bucks or more, but that’s still half the cost of a typical light business jet. Dulude’s operating costs are far lower than those of jets, too, and he can fly in to tiny airports close to his destination that couldn’t handle most jets.

The Mirage has won Dulude the sort of travel flexibility and efficiency that most of us can only daydream about. “When I want to visit some of the companies I own, or that I’m thinking about buying, I’ll just string a bunch of meetings together that run from one end of the country to the other, and do them all in one trip,” he says. “I’ve visited three companies in three different cities and ended up back home, all on the same day. And I know that however long a meeting runs, that plane isn’t leaving without me. The benefits of that sort of convenience can’t be exaggerated.” He doesn’t get much argument at Ampersand, where four of the five partners fly their own planes.

Even so, Dulude doesn’t try to argue that he’s saving money by owning a plane. No matter what the convenience, the damn things just cost so much more than commercial flying—total per-mile costs for an aircraft like Dulude’s run from two to seven times those of a business-class seat, not including the tens of thousands of dollars you’ll eventually spend in pilot training–that you’ll always end up in the red in any sort of reasonable accounting. “You can try to rationalize it by assigning a ridiculously high value to your time,” he says. “But I see it as a quality-of-life question rather than a cost-justification question. You can’t put a value on gaining this sort of flexibility, and of not having to deal with the frustration and loss of control that you put up with in commercial flying.”

Just one more little piece of information for those of you reading this in an airport, as you listen for an announcement about your delayed flight while trying to dodge the ejecta from the guy sneezing next to you: www.trade-a-plane.com.

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When it comes to business travel within the Northeast, there’s nothing more satisfying than climbing into your vehicle, turning the ignition key, pulling out, and then zipping past all the traffic at 160 miles per hour.

Of course, I’m assuming that your vehicle, like the one I’ve depended on for many of my regional trips, has wings—and that you have a pilot’s license. No? Too bad—you’re stuck choosing between crawling along on wheels, delay-maximized and comfort-minimized commercial airlines, or eye-popping pricetags of charter jet travel.

Enchanted as we private pilots are with the convenience, efficiency, and surprising affordability of small-plane travel, most of us sooner or later start wondering why there isn’t a thriving “air taxi” industry in the U.S. to let everyone else in on the deal by ferrying travelers between any of thousands of small airports at a cost of between $100 to $400 per hour of flight. We eventually realize that most people (wrongly) see small prop planes as low-tech to the point of being dangerous, and (rightly) figure they will likely have a much longer, more turbulent flight than they would in a jet.

That’s why small-plane pilots tend to be big believers in the potential of “very light jets,” new four- or five-seat jets from companies like Eclipse Aviation, Cessna, and Adam Aircraft. These micro-jets can operate at close to the same speeds and altitudes as the light business jets flown by charter services, but at less than half the cost. That makes them tailor-made to the needs of an air-taxi service. And any day now, Concord, MA-based Linear Air is expecting approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly its first “VLJ.” Expect service to start in early November. But be fast, a backlog is already brewing.

Linear Air’s CEO, Bill Herp, who got his pilot’s license in 1996, has been a “VLJ” fan ever since he first heard about the concept in 2001. At the time Herp was CEO of e-Dialog, a Lexington-based email-marketing-services firm he founded and eventually built up to over 200 employees, and which constantly sent him and fellow executives on nightmarish, prolonged commercial-airline escapades to pitch potential clients. Herp started playing with the new math of VLJ-enabled flight and decided to build an air-charter business around micro-jets. “E-Dialog was running pretty well, and I saw a window opening for a new approach to air travel,” he says.

Herp turned over the reins of e-Dialog, and by 2003 had raised $6 million to buy a small fleet of eight-seat Cessna Caravan single-prop planes to offer up to executives and high-end New England vacation travelers. “The VLJs weren’t out yet,” he explains, “but the Caravans operate at similar costs on similar kinds of trips, so it was a good way to try out the business model.” Some 1,200 people have flown Linear Air’s Caravans since then, encouraging Herp to open up locations outside of New York City in White Plains and outside of Washington, D.C., in Manassas, VA.

Now the company is ready to step up to jet power. It took delivery on an Eclipse Aviation VLJ earlier this year, and with FAA certification expected momentarily, service could begin within a couple weeks. Herp says he has a database of 8,800 people, mostly business travelers, who haven’t been interested in Caravaning but who say they’re ready to fly in the Eclipse. That’s not hard to understand: The Eclipse travels at nearly twice the Caravan’s 180-mph speed, and because it’s pressurized can usually fly above bad weather. The three-passenger limit is no impediment, insists Herp, noting that most light-jet flights carry only two or three passengers, as do most of his Caravan flights. The bigger problem will be meeting demand. To that end, Linear Air plans to bring another three Eclipses online in the next three months, and another 11 next year. Herp says the company will be operating a fleet of 300 VLJs by the end of 2012, by which time it will employ some 1,000 pilots.

Linear Air will charge about $3,000 for a same-day round-trip flight of about 300 miles in each direction. That’s actually less than three business-class, short-notice tickets cost to most non-major-city destinations on a commercial airline–and you aren’t tied to the airline’s schedule, or the sort of plane changes, security lines, parking hassles, and air-traffic delays that can tack hours onto a flight to a neighboring state. A typical charter jet service, meanwhile, would charge about $7,000. “We’re targeting businesspeople who haven’t been able to justify private air travel, by offering it at a new price point,” says Herp.

Linear Air is likely to face competition from other VLJ operators. DayJet is getting ready to operate a fleet of Eclipses initially in the Southeast and then later nationally. And a Chicopee, MA, start-up called Pogo is also planning to launch service here in the Northeast. But Herp says he’s not worried. Unlike Linear Air, DayJet will operate more like an airline by flying only between a relatively small number of select airports, in the hopes of filling planes. Any airport with a 4,000-foot-long runway will do for Linear Air (though the Eclipse could land on a far shorter one in an emergency). And Pogo doesn’t plan to start flying until 2009. Established charter companies are adding on VLJs, too, but Herp thinks his experience running a high-tech marketing services firm will give him an edge. “VLJs are providing the same sort of classic market disruption that e-mail did, and that opens up an opportunity for new companies to dominate,” he says.

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