THE SKY'S NO LIMIT.

• Author: Martin, Edward

North Carolina's corporate jet setters see company wings not as perks but the best way to broaden their horizons.

Spring blossoms scatter as a stiff breeze sweeps across the tarmac. Last night's rain has ended, making way for a brilliant dawn as a United Dominion Industries Ltd. executive strides out to a gleaming, white Cessna Citation Ultra jet on a secluded side of Charlotte's airport. Bernard Burns lowers himself into a soft, tan seat in a cabin that smells of warm leather. Outside, the pitch of engines is rising. It's just after 8, and the scent of jet fuel in

the damp air drifts through the open door. All around, similar planes are beginning to taxi out on the ramp.

Two-thirds of the way across the country, morning is breaking in Huron, S.D., population 13,000, home of the annual Fall Ringneck Pheasant Festival and South Dakota cheerleading championships. Three years ago, United Dominion bought a company here that makes metal prison doors. "The kind where you slide the food in through a slot," Burns explains.

The division he then headed took on the factory, and Burns, now executive vice president of the parent company, began making regular visits. For Burns, South Dakota is a day trip -- out at sunup, back home in Charlotte by sundown.

United Dominion moved to Charlotte from New Hampshire in 1989, a struggling manufacturing conglomerate with annual revenues of $762 million. This year, with plants in 20 countries, United Dominion has sales approaching $2.5 billion. "This is just a tool for us," he says of the sleek jets that have helped fuel that growth. The roar of engines begins to drown him out. "But it's one of the best productivity machines we've got."

This is the realm of the corporate jet, $3.5 million to $40 million worth of aluminum, titanium, Plexiglas and cordovan leather, a big, white weenie on wings with a pointy nose and attitude. It can land at airports known only to God and map makers, fly at three-quarters the speed of sound and leap continents or oceans in a single bound.

A decade after near death, it's flying high again. Sales nationwide were up a third in 1999, spurred by a robust economy and a new option called fractional ownership, which lets a company buy a share in a plane, like an airborne time-shared condo. Safety isn't a drawback. It's comparable to big airlines, despite the eerie, Flying Dutchman last ride of golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet last fall that ended, coincidentally, in a crater in a South Dakota cornfield.

In North Carolina, the number of corporate aircraft has doubled since 1990. About 450 Tar Heel companies operate their own planes, according to the National Business Aviation Association in Washington. That amounts to about 800 planes, officials there say, roughly half of them business jets. (Nationwide, 3,400 companies own 5,000 jets, although that includes companies that sell shares in hundreds of planes.)

None of which is to say business jets have suddenly become cheap. At an operating cost of $450 an hour, United Dominion s flights to Huron $2,700, including the salaries of the two guys up front. Companies shy about plunking down $3.5 million to buy a Citation -- essentially entry level in the business-jet world can charter one. The meter ticks at $1,950 an hour. With fractional ownership, companies can buy, say, an eighth share of a small jet for about $500,000, but operating expenses add a lot to total cost.

Many companies, such as Durham-based biotech Embrex Inc., which reported revenue of $33.8 million last year, can't justify that kind of outlay. "We're cost-conscious," says Nancy Corliss, vice president for investor relations. "I don't think we've ever seriously considered our own plane, and in fact, we ask our people to fly coach except for flights over a certain distance or time."

Then there's the image. "The business jet is, by nature, beautiful, exciting, powerful and sexy," says Phil Michele, sales vice president for Wichita, Kan.-based Cessna Aircraft Co. That's not bragging as much as it is an apology. While companies such as United Dominion view jets as workhorses in an era of sardine seats, delays and high ticket prices on commercial airlines, not everyone sees it that way. "Companies in the past have been so beaten up by unhappy stockholders that they're dosed-mouthed about their planes," Michele says. "When you're about to report less-than-stellar earnings, you don't want a picture of your smiling chairman bouncing out of the corporate plane." Case in point, the stealth air force of Charlotte banking.

Across a taxiway from United Dominion's jets is a yawning hangar that houses North Carolina's largest and most-sophisticated corporate flight operation. White, with blue and red pinstripes but otherwise unmarked, the Bank of America Corp. fleet consists, according to inside accounts, of $200 million or more in workaday Citations, a larger, twin-engine Raytheon Hawker 800, complete with data ports for computers, and the flagship, Chairman Hugh McColl's $25 million Gulf stream IV, with flat-panel, Air-show 400 en route map and weather system, white-linen dining and crystal tumblers.

Nearby, on a rise up curving First Union Drive, in a...