Widespread outrage over what is perceived as unchecked greed by topU.S. financial and corporate executives first bubbled up in November. That's when it was revealed that the chief executives of the three bigU.S. automakers, appearing before Congress in search ofmulti-billion-dollar government loans, had flown to the hearings intheir private jets.
In response to the fiery indignation thatfollowed, the men were careful to leave their jets at home when theyreturned for another hearing. In fact, the executives at Ford andGeneral Motors announced that their companies would sell their privatejets.
And corporate executives elsewhere are giving up theirprivate planes as well - some because of the considerable operatingcost. But others are losing their airplanes involuntarily when theysimply cannot keep up the payments.
Just as with automobiles on whichmoney is owed and not paid, so-called "repo men" sometimes have to besent to find and seize the planes. Repo is short for repossession bythe legal owner - usually a bank.
There are specialists -airplane repo men - who do this job. They are usually a far cry fromgrungy auto repo men like Otto, a frustrated punk rocker repospecialist in the 1984 movie Repo Man, who sneak up to a car in themiddle of the night, pick the lock or break in, jump the engine, anddrive away while the unsuspecting owner is asleep.
Aircraft repo men like Ken Hill, who was recently profiled in the , are themselves pilots. He doesn't slink around in the deadof night. Once he locates a plane - and that can be the hardest part -he flies in, confronts the owner, and gives him or her a last chance tomake good on payments owed. That is, after having first locked thepropeller so that the plane cannot be flown. If the person cannot orwill not pay, Hill opens the lock using a large set of keys that hecarries, climbs in and flies it away.
Ken Hill's onlyserious confrontation, he told the , was an encounter with anunhappy woman whose plane he was repossessing. He recalls, "She chasedme through a hangar with a garden rake."