Borealis and Buttkick

WHEELTUG

First, El Al, now Jet Airways:

March 6, 2012

MUMBAI: Jet Airways, India’s premier international airline, and WheelTug plc announced today the execution of a Letter of Intent under which Jet Airways, subject to all financial, technical and operational feasibility checks and necessary regulatory approvals, has the right to lease WheelTug Aircraft Drive Systems for installation on its Boeing 737NG aircraft . . .

☞ Wheeltug is owned by Chorus Motors which is owned by Borealis. Borealis shares remain at $3.20 (or $16 million for the whole thing), about where it was in 1999 when I first began writing about it. In case it pans out – which the laws of psychics render all but impossible because I by now own so many shares – the stock should be worth a great deal more.

(WheelTug could save an airline $500,000+ per year per plane. If it earned $50,000 a year from 4,000 planes – and why wouldn’t every commercial jet not ultimately have this? – that would be $200 million in earnings a year. Valued at 5 times earnings, and throwing in all other applications of this and the company’s other technology largely for free, you’d have a company worth more like $1 billion, or 60 times its current valuation.)

So I guess I should say a thing or two about the laws of psychics.

The first thing to say is that these are quite distinct from the Laws of Physics. Forget apples falling on your head. Though little known, the laws of psychics have to do with intuition, delusion, and superstition – not inertia, mass, and force. The First Law of Psychics is that if you really want a bet to pay off, it won’t; especially if you really need it to (I don’t) or if (like me) you feel undeserving of the windfall.

And yet . . . well, this was the reasoning by which I knew Bill Clinton could never win the presidency. Forget Jennifer Flowers or President Bush’s 85% approval rating. Governor Clinton could never be president because: I knew him. If anything was truly a given in life, it was that I was not someone who knew presidents. But he did win.

So if someone I knew could actually be elected president, is it impossible that El Al and Jet Airways will someday be piloting their aircraft around Heathrow like golf carts?

I don’t know. The laws of psychics do not conform to reason and are not well understood. (The laws of sidekicks, by contrast, are as old as time.)

Aviation Week seems to be taking the prospect of electric wheel-drive systems seriously, as summarized here.

BKUTK

Chris re-makes the case for a $600 valuation here. I bought a few more shares at $365.