Time (Zone) Travelers

John Leahy, 54, may be the world's most frequent flier.

As the chief commercial officer of Airbus, Leahy oversees more than 500 sales and marketing personnel in Toulouse, France -- where Airbus is headquartered -- plus Sydney, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, Dubai, and the United States.

He travels 200 days a year and still manages to return to Toulouse for the weekly management board meeting. "All my relatives use my frequent-flier points -- and I'm not running out," he says.

One week this spring, he left Toulouse on a Saturday to fly to Sydney, where he met with Qantas executives about a low-cost airline they're starting and had dinner with the CEO of Air New Zealand to talk about a potential order. On Tuesday, Leahy flew to Singapore for meetings with the heads of Value Air and Singapore Airlines. Wednesday night, he flew back to Paris for a Thursday shareholder meeting of EADS, the French company that owns 80% of Airbus. Friday morning, he left for Miami to have dinner with the president of Lan Chile Airlines. Saturday morning, he flew to El Salvador for the funeral of the president of that country's airline. He was back home in Toulouse by 5 p.m. on Sunday.

Leahy, no surprise, is a firm believer in the power of personal presence. "Videoconferencing is overrated," he says. "Trying to sell airplanes requires a lot of face-to-face contact." Especially if it's the Airbus A380, with a price tag of $280 million. "It's hard to say over a videoconference, 'No, what you've heard from our competitors about the price of Airbus spares isn't true,' " he says. "You've got to be in front of the guy for hours, sometimes days on end."

Leahy's Rules of the Road

1. Stay focused on what you're flying in to accomplish. The travel itself can distract you from the reason you're traveling, he says.
2. "Try to exercise whenever possible. Even if you can just run in the hotel gym for 30 minutes, you get oxygen into your blood and your body starts to acclimate."
3. "The worst thing you can ever do when you arrive somewhere is take a nap in the daylight hours. Just don't do it."
4. Leahy says he couldn't live without his GSM phone, which "rings in my pocket no matter where I am in the world, be it Beijing or New York." He leaves the phone on night and day. "I might yell at the person for waking me up, but that's better than losing a deal because I didn't answer."

Scott Kirsner is glad to be back home in Boston.