With a corporate client base which includes business giants Procter & Gamble, FlightTime.com has now been in existence for just over a year. Nonetheless, for the true origins of this particular charter broker, you need to look back much further.

Jane McBride, the company's spokeswoman, told EBAN: "The idea for this came way back in 1983 when I was working in London and met my business partner to-be working for an American tour operator. The company was moving massive numbers of Americans on cheap charter flights to Europe, which were continually being delayed and oftentimes didn't show up.

"About a year later, we decided with a third partner that somebody needed, in effect, to be an air charter broker. This wasn't an industry in existence in America at the time. So we started in 1985 with three of us.

For a good number of years, FlightTime International - as it was then called - was very much an old-fashioned charter broker. "Until", says McBride, "two things happened."

"Firstly, we launched in London in response to our larger clients who wanted us to have a presence over here. Secondly, we started to look at the internet and formulate an internet strategy.

"What we realised pretty rapidly is that the internet is the perfect medium to do what we had previously done by fax, SITA and phone, in that it enabled us to aggregate all the supply in one platform."

Up until McBride's company took on its internet status, business was said to be ticking along quite nicely. Said McBride: "Up until the point when we launched the internet site, we ran it as a very closely-held business. There were just two of us who owned the company in its entirety and things were going pretty well.

"With the dawning of the new millennium, came the realisation that we had two options. We could continue doing business quite profitably and accept that we'd always be a small company in the general scheme of things.

"Or we could take a leap of faith and launch the thing, literally and figuratively, to the next level."

With the decision to broaden its horizons, the forces behind FlightTime.com were required to go out and seek new capital. After all, said McBride: "In order to create the truly global company that was and is our vision, would require acquisition and growth and therefore significant capital investment."

At this point, FlightTime.com built up its senior management team, bringing onboard a seasoned coo, a new president, it formed a board of directors, and it brought in two outside investors. The company was then in a position to make three to four acquisitions, which it did in a fairly short period of time.

With regard to the company's product offerings, McBride explained: "If you go to FlightTime.com now, you can obtain information and pricing on a variety of aircraft, and you can book the charter of a whole plane in its entirety, whether it's a six-seat Learjet or a 747.

"What we have also recently developed is along the lines of the Procter & Gamble shuttle. That is, a virtual private airline which in the case of Procter & Gamble, is running back and forth between Brussels and Cincinnati, exclusively for them."What FlightTime.com is working on now, is a shared corporate shuttle. McBride explained: "We're in negotiation with a couple of companies, companies which are flying over the same route and are non-competitive. For example, New York-London, where there's tremendous transatlantic traffic.

"It's a perfect opportunity to create a private airline that can be shared by one, two or three companies and the benefits to them, beyond the obvious significant cost savings, are the use of reliever airports. Having spent a lot of time at Heathrow and Gatwick over the past two months, I sure wish that this was available to me right now.

"On the US side, they're not experiencing quite the same congestion that's happening over here. But Bradley Airport, for example, is a nice alternative to New York. The traveller may then avoid all the aggravations associated with the airports."

The main benefit of the corporate shuttle, say McBride, is the ability of the individual to work both productively and without fear of being observed by competitors, en route.

She explained: "One of the companies that we are talking to is so paranoid about their competitors catching wind of what they're doing, that they're not allowed to have anything on their bags or person that says who they are, let alone open up their laptops and tap away at some merger proposal.

"P&G has really loved that aspect of their shuttle. They get onboard and plug in for six hours - six hours that would otherwise be wasted watching a movie or peering over your shoulder, making sure no one's watching you."