A company positioning its crew by light aircraft, etc is a very different thing from staff travel. Staff travel is the requirement of the employee whereas positioning is the requirement of the company. There’s no way I could say to TCX to hire a Piper Aztec plus 2 pilots (we have an agreement since the Airtours crash that we will not be flown by a single pilot any more) to fly me from my local airport (Heathrow!) to NCL or GLA there and back every time I go to work. Even if they did it would mean that my flight duty period would have to commence at Heathrow which would mean I was unavailable to do any reasonable length duty once at my place of employment. Now on the other hand if I wanted to sort out my own standby travel that would be my own business and my report would commence up north. However, if I was ever late I’d be subject to disciplinary action for failing to meet the report times as stated in my contract of employment. For short/medium haul there really is no viable solution than to live within reasonable distance. Long haul is a whole different kettle of fish!

Also, those aircraft Mark has listed are the BA Flying Club at Booker, High Wycombe. They are used for people to train for their PPLs. They are not used for positioning crews. That would be a commercial operation. We use Ravenair at Manchester. In fact I caused the use of ravenair a couple of weeks ago when I contacted our maintenance control in the cruise to report a failed instrument. They sent a spare from Manchester to our destination (GLA) on a Ravenair Aztec so that the engineers could get the aircraft fixed so that it could continue to Arrecife. Unfortunately we had picked the aircraft up from Monarch Engineering at LUT so it was pretty unimpressive that we actually had a total of 3 significant faults materialise on a 45 minute flight!