When it comes to getting away from it all, the sky isn’t the limit—it can be the entire point. Take a balloon, for instance. No, really, step inside a wicker basket and rise above Greenville; you don’t even have to tap your ruby slippers to get out of town. Or perhaps you’d prefer to zip off to a dreamy vacation spot in a private plane. Welcome aboard: chartering an aircraft isn’t just for corporate jet setters anymore.
“Not everyone’s familiar with charter, but once people try it—if they can afford it and they use it—they really get hooked on it, and they don’t call the airlines anymore,” says Tim McConnell, CEO and president of DoubleDay Aviation at Greenville Downtown Airport.
He started the company in 2017, and when the pandemic hit, chartering soared: no uncertainties; no concerns about ever-shifting health regulations (or other passengers); no TSA lines; no rate differences based on your departure times or dates. He can get you in the air with about three-days’ notice.
Corporate trips account for 90% of DoubleDay’s on-demand flights, the rest from leisure travelers—McConnell’s favorites outings. “I do a lot of fishing trips and hunting trips, golf trips,” he says. He especially enjoys getting to join the pheasant hunts in South Dakota or offshore fishing in the Florida Keys. (Alas, he doesn’t advertise those jaunts; he offers them only to regular customers several times a year. As business grows, though, he says he just might.)
He relishes talking about other fanciful excursions. For instance, in the mid-2000s, he regularly flew a family of three to Hawaii for a two-week stay (and, yes, he gets to stay, too). “I used to do that trip every year for about five years. It was on the son’s birthday,” he says of the round-trip with airfare that takes the cake at $155,000.
Experience Peace and Quiet with Balloon Flights
Over Memorial Day weekend, he flew a family of four from Greenville to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a Friday-through-Thursday vacay. They chartered the trip for the same reasons most others do, he says: “They want to stay together, travel together. The airline schedules didn’t meet their schedule. Plus, they like the privacy of being in our own airplane.”
So let’s say you’ve got around $50k to take your sweetheart for a nice little junket somewhere. McConnell says that’ll get you to the Virgin Islands or Turks and Caicos for a couple of weeks. Or you could visit Bermuda, although you’d get only a week to shop for shorts there because that flight distance requires a jet, which costs more than one of DoubleDay’s elegant Cirrus SR22s, the sleek turboprop with a parachute built in for even more peace of mind.
Interestingly, DoubleDay’s hourly rates are not all that far apart from the rates at Palmetto Sun Balloons. And when you chat with Roger Clark, who’s logged 4,000 flight hours running the family business that started in 1983, you feel a similar urge to take to the friendly skies.
“I think that COVID made people realize that—you know what?—we’ve got to get out there and live life, and if you want to do something, you need to go do it. Don’t wait,” he says.
Balloon trips generally last about an hour, with as many as three or four people floating noiselessly up to around 1,500 to 2,000 feet. “If we’re out in the country, we’ll drop down right on the treetops or down into fields and things like that—the lower the better because we can talk to people as we fly over.”
PSB fills its schedule with lots of celebrants: birthday parties, engagements, weddings, anniversaries. “And it’s a bucket-list item,” Clark says, “or they’re kind of adventurous, and they just want to do something different.”
The key difference between charter and balloon trips (other than the obvious) is that the former requires a flight plan and the latter, well, as Clark admits, “We know generally where we’re going, but I couldn’t tell you a place that I was going to land.”
Isn’t that, after all, the point of escaping?
Photography by Cirrus Aircraft
