Flagship Air looks to take off from Ann Arbor Airport

Concentrate, 11/20/2008

Flying options are about to grow in Metro Detroit as Ann Arbor gets ready to welcome its first airline.

Excerpt:

Tim Patton didn’t start out wanting to create a local airline but that's just what the veteran entrepreneur ended up doing with Flagship Private Air.

"It really started as a personal passion," Patton says.

The chairman and CEO of Patton Holdings (based out of Domino's Farms) bought a private plane a few years ago for his health-care company. He often needed to go to small, out-of-the-way places like Hershey, Pennsylvania, for business, places that were prohibitively expensive to fly commercially out of Detroit's Metro Airport.

He wasn't alone. Plenty of local business people found flying either too expensive or too time inefficient using major airlines. And then the CFL went off over Patton's head.

"There is no one else doing this here in Ann Arbor," Patton says. "Why not make a business out of this?"

Read the rest of the story here.

Aerotropolis , Entrepreneurship

Ann Arbor