#56:"Da Plane! Da Plane!"(Part 1)

Flying Ball's Friendly Skies

The larger of Ball’s two jets, outside a hanger the company shared at the time with two other companies at what is now Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport. The airport was sandwiched between two Ball offices, with aerospace (since sold) to the north, and Ball’s packaging offices and new(er) corporate headquarters to the south.

I’ve always believed Ball Corporate’s two company jets are among the most misunderstood facets of working at Ball.

In pop culture, company planes have long been a symbol of capitalist excess. Even within Ball, I would occasionally hear grumbles about “the execs and their company planes.”

Actually, Ball’s planes provided a competitive advantage to the company in multiple ways, including being used in support of crisis relief in places like Haiti and for charitable organizations such as the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Also, and I am speaking only for myself here, they were freakin’ AWESOME compared to commercial flying.

Aviation is part of Ball’s DNA. Its former aerospace business developed and sold aviation technology, notably antennas. Edmund F. Ball himself, son of one of the founding Ball brothers and long-time company president, was a licensed pilot and flew planes for decades after he retired in 1970. He wrote a book about flying.

As a company, Ball has had aviation capabilities of one kind or another for more than 50 years. A well-traveled insider story featured the cantankerous John W. Fisher, a former Ball CEO who retired in 1981, and a trip on that era’s company plane. The story goes that a Ball PR employee was flying for the first time on the plane, and Fisher noticed him gawking out one of the windows at the view below.

The hard-driving Fisher, annoyed at what he perceived as wasting time, allegedly threw a manilla file of company papers at the unlucky employee, which hit the employee in his chest and fell to the floor. “If you need something to do…” Fisher supposedly barked, “…read these!”