BROOKLINE, Mass.--Jan. 15--At Flight Time International, all playoff games have the same outcome: a chance to fly fans to the final event.
That's not to diminish the Patriots' big win on Sunday.
But by 5 a.m. Monday, co-owner and president Patricia Zinkowski was at her desk, orchestrating an action plan that sent her 24-member staff to the phones to sell Flight Time's services as an expert in arranging charter flights.
By last night they had produced four charter flights to New Orleans for Super Bowl Sunday, with at least four more in the works.
One of the firm bookings is a flight from New York for 170 CBS Radio employees and advertisers that will stay three days and then, before departure, take them on a day trip to Cancun.
A prospect still waiting to be heard from: Patriots owner Bob Kraft, whose staff was shopping yesterday for a plane that could carry family and friends to the game in red-carpet style.
And maybe Hootie and the Blowfish. They'll need a lift from South Carolina if they make a Super Bowl halftime appearance, and Flight Time's agents were trying to close the deal.
Alas for Zinkowski, the Patriots team has a contract with Northwest Airlines, as does the Green Bay Packers organization.
But before sports clubs began making their own deals with airlines in return for brand-name identity, Flight Time was all over the athletics scene, booking charters for not only the Pats and Red Sox and Bruins and Celtics but the Hartford Whalers, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Milwaukee Bucks.
Founded 11 years ago by three travel-savvy women who saw what happens when charter flights don't show up, Flight Time has used its sports industry savvy to punch its way to leadership in an industry estimated to be worth about $100 million annually.
Last year Zinkowski, 39, and her business partner, Jane McBride, 37, booked 1,600 flights carrying 187,000 people on journeys ranging from Aruba vacations to ges that ferried guests to billionaire Malcolm Forbes' extravagant 70th birthday party in Morocco.
Constituting about five percent of all air travel, charter aircraft brokerage is a busy field these days. Fred Gevalt, president of the Air Charter Guide, published in Cambridge, says most business is from short-term leases of executive aircraft by CEOs who dumped their corporate fleets during the recession but still love the Learjet life.
Fewer than a dozen brokers specialize in airliner-size planes as Flight Time does. Zinkowski said 1996 revenues were $19 million -- the same figure Flight Time's biggest rival, Charter Services of Albuquerque, N.M., reported. Privately held, neither Flight Time nor Charter Services discloses earnings.
Zinkowski was a bookkeeper at Trans National Travel in Boston and McBride a tour group leader for the same company when, along with McBride's cousin, Dara Zapata, they decided in 1985 to start their company with $15,000 in borrowed capital.
Zapata sold her shares to her partners in 1994 and left the business to raise a family.
The heart of the business was development of a database, now computerized, that tracks where idle aircraft are parked on any given day. About half the airplanes Flight Time books are owned and operated by airlines that, despite best efforts, can't put every plane in its proper place at the end of every day.
The rest are on charter specialists -- Miami Air, American Trans Air and North American Airlines among them.
Zinkowski said sports still provides 40 percent of Flight Time's business. Entertainment follows, with rock bands as big customers. With commercial airlines trimming luxury amenities, she sees growth in flights that pamper passengers. Hot towels, massage therapists and champagnes are being offered as extras in Flight Time's new promotional packages.
Pats fans may not see any of this. 'Pats fans are more beer drinkers than wine fanciers,' Zinkowski acknowledged yesterday.
But if Bob Kraft calls, she's ready to give him the Malcolm Forbes treatment.
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