customers behaving badly
 

Just wondering how you pilots deal with kids who are ruining the interior, pets, and passengers smoking etc.

We don't allow smoking in our airplanes. If they want to destroy the airplane, fine, let them. That particular share owner will get a bill for the cleaning service, however.

At NetJets, the owners can smoke, but I've only had one in the last year who chose to. After the flight, a professional cleaning crew did a full cleaning and smoke removal, which is charged to the owner's account. Normally, as long as the mess doesn't do major damage to the interior, that's what happens. I've heard of owners getting asked to leave the program for completely trashing the plane to the extent it takes it out of service for more than a day or so, but I can't verify that.

Geez, how obnoxious and disrespectful (Or drunk) do you have to be to trash an airplane so bad that it is grounded for more than a day? I can only think of intentionally un-upholstering seats, tearing the cabin liner or ripping cabin lights out of their sockets... Or maybe pouring dry ice in the lav...

I haven't really heard much about that kind of malicious, intentional damage, but if you think about, all it takes to ground one of these jets for a week or more would be an ink pen or permanent marker in the hands of an artistic 3-year old. Sidewall or headliner replacement isn't a quick fix. I can also imagine that these "war stories" about how bad a plane got trashed get more sensational each time they're told, so who knows how bad it really was unless you were actually there.

And when I say a day, I'm accounting for the fact that a cleaning crew isn't standing by at every stop. It takes some time, and often a short ferry leg to get the cleaning done. It also takes time for carpet to dry after it's shampooed, so it's not usually a quick turn even for something as simple as a soft drink spilled on the carpet.