The Ultimate Time Machine

It's the absolute time machine. We are in our hangar here at the Napa County airport, where we keep our Bell 429 -- it's a wonderful location to be our base of operations. I'm Christian Palmaz -- I fly the Bell 429. My family owns and operates three companies here in California: one, a material-science company based in Silicon Valley, and two agricultural properties -- one, Palmaz Vineyards, here in the Napa Valley, and also a Wagyu cattle ranch in the High Sierras called the Genesee Valley Ranch. Being pilot in the family, it's been actually a lot of fun to not only provide that service to myself but also to my other family members -- it's a little bit different than, I think, starting a flight department, but the winery and the other companies get to leverage this really unique tool that we've been able to add to our toolbox. Being able to go from the sea-level environment here at the Bay Area, up to 7,000 feet at the mountainous environments in the High Sierras -- in the summer that's a really critical thing to be asking of an aircraft, so we really needed a safe and effective way to get up there and also to cut out that four-and-a-half-hour drive; it makes being able to manage that property go from say a once-a-week operation to something that can happen almost every other day, because the aircraft turns that four-and-a-half-hour drive into a less-than-one-hour flight. We are really three generations operating these businesses -- we have the privilege of getting to spend a lot of time together as a result, not just professionally but also personally, being a Latin family -- we have a lot of meals together, and kind of center our lives professionally and personally around the table -- we make products that really bring people around the table, and so we really value that. Beyond valuing my own time, I really value family time -- I think that's particularly been the best thing the aircraft has given us back, and it's just being able to do a full workday, feel like you've accomplished what you needed to accomplish, and then get home and spend that time with your family and your kids. The safety factor is enormous with the 429 -- if I'm willing to put my family in the aircraft, my son flies with me. Obviously I believe the aircraft is more than safe, and we wanted the additional safety, a little bit of additional power. The 429 was quite unique in the sense that it was fast, could carry quite a bit, and its operating costs were quite low, and allowed us to move all the people and stuff that we needed to the locations we were going, and gave us that additional capability of IFR flight, which was really important here in the Bay Area. When we were looking at other aircraft, there's actually quite a lot of options in the light-twin market -- what we noticed was a lot of these aircraft did one thing well but sacrificed something else. We really need the aircraft to do a lot of things, and we found that the 429 allowed us to take what we needed and do it quickly and do it at a lower cost. It's uncomparable -- it's really uncomparable.