Engage a professional advisor / agent!
To Biocybertronics and the G-II.
Welcome to PPRuNe.com. Congratulations on your decision to privatize your corporations air travel.
My two cents worth...
Without going in to full detail here, properly selecting a relevant aircraft follows fairly well established guidelines. It begins without consideration of any particular aircraft at all. Typically, the choice of a specific manufacturer, make, or model of aircraft comes almost at the end of the process, and is generally driven from within the process. The appropriate category / model of aircraft will narrow to a very specific few models. Choosing among those is another major drill in and of itself.
If this is a real event you speak of, then you simply must engage the services of a professional. In business, one does this as matter of course with any planned multi-million dollar / euro expenditure. Whether that experienced professional is to be the Manager or Chief Pilot of your new Flight Department, or an experienced Aircraft Brokerage House, or other Qualified and Experienced Consultant, is one of your early decisions and requires a fair amount of research on its own.
I and my colleagues and others do this sort of guidance as our primary business, worldwide. We routinely write very involved contracts for the buyers to protect themselves during the selection and pre-purchase process. We use internationally known escrow companies to handle all financial transactions, assuring both seller and buyer.
We typically mandate that pre-purchase inspections are performed at an industry leading facility. This is an absolute requirement to assure the necessary depth of knowledge and quality of work on the make and model under consideration and to provide additional guarantees of the aircraft condition. We can easily spend several days just reading and researching logbooks and maintenance releases - line by line, page by page, before we ever physically approach the aircraft. Again, there is a clear process to buying an aircraft, and it is detailed and time consuming.
To acquire the proper aircraft, one well fitted to your actual travel needs, and budget, I strongly recommend an association with a professional. He or she can actually save you money, time, exasperation, and prevent hugely expensive errors and oversights.
You have identified some of your needs, such as destinations, but you cannot realistically speak of a specific aircraft until you have thoroughly investigated the actual Airways distances that you will have to fly to reach them and their alternate airports. Average trip winds and temps aloft for those routes? Required altitudes? Average passenger complements? Route specific equipment and equipment certifications? Expected standard delays for those airports? Available runway requirements? Night bans?
You spoke of heavy baggage requirements; what are permissible aircraft baggage compartment floor loadings? External loading accessibility. Aircraft acceptance of heavy loads aft?
Country specific equipment requirements? Noise certificates and noise bans. Bans on specific aircraft and engine models (such as G-II prohibitions). Age limitations - aircraft and crew! Available maintenance support? Tax certificates and country of registration? Layover taxation traps! Airway charges vs a/c weight? Handling agents?
Crew costs, training costs, hull insurance costs, liability costs, restoration costs, storage costs, refurbishment costs, Contract crew use and when. Computerized maintenance tracking. Third party fixed maintenance insurance programs vs available manufacturers programs, or neither? And many, many more pages of questions.
An experienced advisor can provide the questions you should be asking, and provide the answers that ultimately will shape your choice of aircraft.
Your capital outlay for aircraft acquisition and start-up will be in the many millions of dollars. Your annual budget may be upwards of a million dollars, and in a few years will exceed the total of capital costs. Being unaware of impending mandatory changes in air laws in various regions of the world could actually ground your newly acquired corporate workhorse.
I'm a long term Gulfstream pilot - G-II, G-III, G-IV, G-V and their variants - but the Gulfstream may not even be a suitable choice. Fantasy choices of aircraft here are fun, but are a diversion outside of and ahead of a professionally guided process.
Regards and good luck.
Last edited by GLF5driver; 8th Nov 2012 at 10:17.