Easy jets ... why flying private might be easier than you think

In June ‘the world’s first corporate aviation showroom for business jet aircraft’ opened on Hyde Park Corner. The Jet Business, a plush space complete with a mock-up of a luxury jet interior, is owned by New Yorker Steve Varsano. He chose London, he says, because ‘anybody who can afford a jet comes to London’.

So far, most walk-in customers have been ‘super-high net worth Indians’ and wealthy Eastern Europeans. Of course, we are used to oligarchs and stadium rockers traversing the globe on their private jets, and marvel at the story of John Travolta advising Beyoncé on her purchase of a £25 million Bombardier Challenger 850 as a Father’s Day present for Jay-Z, in the way we might marvel at Martians.

But private jet travel is no longer the preserve of potentates and pop stars. Admittedly your average hedge funder will not be flying back from Vale de Lobo in their own Bombardier, but they might well be flying private care of companies such as NetJets or VistaJets which offer pay-as-you-go (anything from £3,000-£8,000 an hour) options with their private fleets. European private jet business is up nine per cent on last year, and it is easy to see why the option is so popular among the ‘regular’ rich — the bankers and entrepreneurs — for whom first class is just not swanky enough.

From London, the private jet-set holiday routes begin at RAF Northolt, Biggin Hill, Luton and Cranfield. People off to St Tropez, Sardinia or Ibiza can arrive at one of these airstrips ten minutes before their flight is scheduled, get fast-tracked through a polite and perfunctory customs and immigration control and take as many sharp knives and bottled liquids on board as they can carry; this is how the other half does ‘speedy boarding’.

Once on the aircraft, flights are usually shorter (private jets tend to be a lot faster than passenger ones — a Cessna Citation X, for example, has a cruising speed of 604mph while a Boeing 747 travels at just over 500mph). ‘It is quite possible to do office to villa in under three hours,’ says John Hitchcox, owner of the Yoo property development brand and sometime private jet-setter.

T he rarefied air might not yet be quite as hectic as it was back in the heady days of 2007 when private jet traffic was getting first dibs on airstrip Tarmac over military aircraft at RAF Northolt, but during this summer’s peak season there were more than 30 private jet landings a day on Ibiza and it is here that the new democratisation of private jet travel is most evident. Every weekend at Ibiza Airport you will see banks of jets (four- to seven-seat Citations mainly), each bearing the livery of a different superstar DJ or nightclub. There’s Afrojack’s ‘AfroAir’ plane and the ‘Subliminal Sessions’ jet used by Erick Morillo. Alongside those are jets waiting for David Guetta and Tiësto. The Bombardier Learjet 31A with the tail number D-CURT and a wild op-art paint job that says ‘Sven Väth 30 Years of DJing’ on the fuselage is there to shuttle the veteran German techno god back and forth from his Monday night residency at Amnesia.

‘Ten years ago the idea of a DJ demanding a private jet was considered outrageous, but in the past decade it’s almost become an industry standard,’ says Pacha resident DJ Pete Tong. ‘Erick Morillo started it all.’

Nowadays, says Tong, all DJs have a contact at NetJets or are hooked up with Twitter concierge services like @PrivateJetLady (‘From Light Jets to G550s, we can have you flying in style within two hours’). They are conversant in the vernacular of fractional ownership (where you buy air hours instead of owning a plane outright) and the sudden availability of ‘dead legs’ (planes making return flights with empty cabins that can then be purchased), and can tell a Bravo from a Mustang. It’s worth noting that even in these straitened times, Dutch-born Tiësto’s annual income from gigs and producing is said (according to the Forbes rich list) to exceed $20 million gross, so he can comfortably afford the fees. ‘On some (scheduled) airlines, I’m platinum for life,’ Tiësto explains. ‘But now I use a private jet. It makes a big difference.’ Four years ago, inspired by Morillo’s audacity, Pete Tong requested that a newly inked contract with the San Antonio club Eden should include a jet to take him and his extended family from London to Ibiza every Friday night. Eden’s management team quickly agreed.

As a freeloading Londoner I’ve been on a few private flights myself: back to the capital from a big party in Sofia with Bryan Ferry and a Bulgarian telecommunications billionaire, a casino-centric day-trip to Monaco with Matthew Freud, a chartered Concorde flight from New York to Nice with 20 or so Victoria’s Secret models (Laetitia Casta took her puppy along for the ride in a Gucci doggy bag), and a trip to a 50th birthday party in the Ukraine with Dannii Minogue and Val Kilmer (don’t ask), where the Mayfair gallerist Tim Jefferies took over the trolley dolly duties on the outbound flight. I’ve waved friends off as they’ve boarded Richard Branson’s Falcon 900EX ‘Galactic Girl’ and I once witnessed the Topshop billionaire Philip Green gift David Walliams a flight home from Ibiza.

My friend Guy Pratt, sometime bassist in Pink Floyd, tells me that the most fun you can have flying rock’n’roll private is playing a game where you try to stay standing up for take off and landing. Preferably while drunk. But the main thing I’ve learned about private jets is that rich men pay and pretty girls fly for free. In fact, I’d like to stick my nose cone out and predict that no single blonde under 30 has ever paid her own way on one of these mini-cabs of the mega rich. Sending a girl flowers is nice, but sending a private jet is a statement of unparalleled logistical largesse, and considerably more seductive than champagne or chocolates.