Neal Dempsey -- a principal in Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Bay Partners -- was fed up with airline travel. Every year, he and five other partners read 1,000 business plans from high-technology start-ups, conduct 250 meetings with the entrepreneurs that boast the most-promising ideas and then decide which 15 early-stage companies are worth investing in. Conducting such a painstaking screening process properly requires a lot of travel, but the scheduled air carriers have been unable to keep up with Dempsey's schedule.

"It is important for me to meet with [the leaders of] these early-stage, high-tech companies face-to-face, rather than just by phone or at monthly board meetings," he explained. "The competitive nature of our business is such that we need to be in front of entrepreneurs to sell them on the value our firm can add. If we're not there to sell them at the right time, we might miss out on a chance to invest.

"I was really tired of the commercial [airline] world," continued Dempsey, who came from a working class suburb of Tacoma, put himself through college and spent years working for technology companies himself before joining Cupertino, California-based Bay Partners in 1989. "I've traveled zillions of miles. Commercial air travel is awful, and I didn't see it getting better. A fractional aircraft program represented a good way for me to accomplish my goals [of convenient air travel] without buying an entire airplane."

Dempsey examined numerous business aircraft options and sampled the services of several charter and fractional aircraft operators. He was particularly impressed with Raytheon's Travel Air fractional-share program, which allows him to fly up to 100 hours per year, and decided that owning 1/8 of a Beechjet would be his best solution.

Dempsey has been flying with Raytheon since March, mostly in the Western and Mountain states. During that time, his light jet has been late only once, by a mere seven minutes, which, according to the airlines' definition, is "on time."

Pleased with this new-found efficiency, Dempsey has upgraded his fractional share so that he can regularly use a Raytheon Hawker 800, a mid-size jet with enough range to allow him to fly nonstop to the East Coast from his home airport of San Jose. He now takes trips he would never have attempted if he had to go by airline, such as flying to Seattle, San Diego, Portland and Chicago in a day and a half.

Besides utilizing the aircraft for his travel needs, Dempsey uses it for recruiting. Once Bay Partners invests in a company, the firm looks for talented, aggressive people from marketing specialists to middle managers and top executives to help run the fledgling enterprises.

"There's nothing more impressive to people you're trying to hire than to tell them you'll send the plane for them," said Dempsey. Flying a candidate into Bay Partners' headquarters on a business aircraft "lets them know we're serious."