This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@xxxxxxxxx Bringing Private Order to a Chaotic Sky March 18, 2003 By JOE SHARKEY CHICAGO ACED with an expected last-minute trip, I went onto Orbitz .com to check fares. They were crazy, as usual. Some examples: American, Continental and United all had reasonable walk-up, round-trip fares of about $460, nonstop from Newark to Chicago's O'Hare. Yet America also had a fare, same day, Newark to O'Hare, for a curious $1,199 - with a stop in Raleigh-Durham, N.C. Already jet lagged from a weekend trip to London, I wasn't looking forward to the airport experience in either Newark or O'Hare, let alone the grim warrens of Raleigh-Durham. Then I remembered the name Indigo, a corporate-jet service that began operating two weeks ago between Teterboro, a private airport in New Jersey that handles a lot of business jets, and Midway, Chicago's secondary airport. So I called and asked the price. "We have an introductory half-price offer, $749 round trip," the Indigo agent replied. "Sign me up," I said. The next morning, a half-hour before departure time, I parked my car (free) outside Indigo's lounge at a small private terminal at Teterboro. The plane, a sleek new Embraer ERJ 135, waited just outside the terminal as the pilot himself checked the identifications and carry-on bags of the four passengers. "Everybody's here," the pilot said, glancing over the manifest. "Let's go, then," suggested William P. Kostel Jr., Indigo's vice president for marketing. We took off 10 minutes early and arrived at Midway in time for me to get on the El, head into the Loop for a quick early afternoon meeting and head back to the airport for the trip home. Over the years, I've been inside most current models of corporate jets, from the light-cabin Cessna Citation Bravos to the bowling-alley expanses of the luxury Boeing Business Jets, which are basically 737's with most of the seats out and a bedroom in the back. Likewise, an 86-foot-long Embraer ERJ 135 is usually crammed with 37 seats for use as a regional jet. But outfitted as a corporate jet, with 16 plush leather seats set one on each side of the aisle, it offers a whole different travel experience. But as a business model, will it fly? Indigo, based in Chicago, originally began service in 2000 with a fleet of older Falcon 20 aircraft that proved to be too high-maintenance to suit the business model, said Peter A. Pappas, the chief executive. The airline ceased operations while raising cash to buy the new Embraer jets, with 2 of them now in service and 23 more on firm order. Right now, service is limited to the Teterboro-Midway route (the round-trip fare for that will be $1,498 after the half-price offer ends on March 31). In April, the company expects to take delivery of a third jet and start daily flights between Westchester and Midway. As new planes come in, point-to-point routes will be expanded nationally. Indigo is officially designated as a corporate charter service that also sells individual seats to anyone who wants to book one. The distinction is tricky. Community groups living near private airports like Teterboro in densely populated areas tend to be vigilant about expansion into scheduled commercial airline service. At Teterboro, such groups are seeking to block Indigo's operations. Recently, bigger airline companies have also adopted the idea of offering premium service on business jets - most notably Lufthansa, which flies 48-seat business jets between Newark and Munich and Düsseldorf and will add Chicago-Düsseldorf service this spring. Indigo is positioned to use private airport terminals, including the one where its headquarters are at Midway. Private terminals allow passengers to avoid long lines and "security hassles," Mr. Pappas said. Indigo's fares will be about the same as those of commercial airlines' walk-up, refundable economy seats - the so-called Y fare. In his office in Chicago, Mr. Pappas said that he had just pitched the concept to a travel manager for a major international company. "When I got to the pricing part of the presentation, I explained to her that we're offering the private-jet experience at a price that compares to the full economy fare," he said. "She sat back and said, `I thought you were going to tell me that your fares compared to commercial first-class fares' " - which, Mr. Pappas noted, many companies prohibit for use by travelers on domestic flights. Indigo also is marketing its service to the growing number of companies that own fractional shares in corporate jets. Under fractional deals, mileage on corporate jets is limited to a fixed amount annually. "We're seeing people who own a fractional share and don't want to burn their miles on a trip between New York and Chicago, say," Mr. Pappas said. "But these people have become accustomed to work space and time convenience of the private jet, and we think Indigo makes sense for them." Well, that's the pitch, and we'll see. The big expansion of fractional-share private-jet services in recent years shows, though, that a segment of the heavy-duty business travel market has come to despair at the steadily deteriorating service and worsening accommodations of the financially distressed commercial airlines, and to be willing to pay a premium for something better. On my late-afternoon return trip from Midway, I spoke with such a business traveler, Anastasia Valentine, a director of Resource 1, a software consulting company based near Chicago. She was already a convert. "When I found out at 2 p.m. that I was needed in New York, I was quickly scheduled" on the Indigo 5:10 p.m. flight out of Midway, she said. She said she drove home from her office near Chicago, packed a bag and "had a solid hour" with her husband and 14-month-old son before she headed to Midway. "I pulled up at the hangar at 4:50 p.m., parked my car 10 feet from the door," and was in the air for 20 minutes later, "calm and relaxed" and "mentally and physically prepared to conduct business," she said. On the Road appears each Tuesday. 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