How many illegally overloaded jets does a company have to crash to get credit for slowing business among Manhattan jet-setters? Seriously. Two weeks after the second executive from Fort Lauderdale's Platinum Jet Management entered a guilty plea to charges that the company allowed unqualified pilots and unsafe jets to fly out of Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, those executives failed to garner a mention in the New York Magazine article that eulogizes the airport. That article begins:
Until recently, the Teterboro Airport, just twelve miles west of midtown Manhattan, was synecdochical for the New York Dream. It was a landmark of the social geography mapped by "Page Six," Fortune, and Gossip Girl. "Teterboro!" the narrator of Plum Sykes's bubble novel Bergdorf Blondes rhapsodized, riffing on "PJs" -- private jets, which take off and land there. "All New York girls know that ugly word means something very pretty. Teterboro means 'I have a plane.'"The magazine would have you believe that celebrities and business big shots have spurned the airport based on a new sense of modesty they've adopted since the economy went to the crapper. Sure. Because modesty and a social conscience are such common traits among the upper crust.
Here's another theory: Teterboro's air traffic thinned out because
its wealthy clientele was scared that its own jets would follow the
flight path of this Platinum jet in 2005, as described in a recent Wall Street Journal story:
The Bombardier Challenger corporate jet ran off the departure end of the runway, plowed through an airport fence, crossed a six-lane highway and ran into a warehouse.
