Favoured by rock stars and royalty, it is considered by many to be the ultimate trapping of success – the private jet. Available at a moment’s notice to whisk you off to Cannes or Cape Town in the lap of luxury, it is the ultimate in making travelling stress-free.
This is also why the private jet is so popular among business travellers. Flexibility is probably the most important factor that separates the business from the leisure traveller and a private jet provides that in spades.
The downside of the private jet dream is cost. Buying your own jet is not cheap. You won’t get much change from ten million US dollars for many of the popular small jets on the market and that is without taking into account ongoing maintenance and operating costs.
Yet even in these cash-strapped times, when companies are cracking down on the cost of business travel, making employees fly economy rather than club class, there is still plenty of appetite for travel by private jet. According to the Civil Aviation Authority, there are more than 275,000 business and private jet movements each year at UK airports.
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What may come as a surprise is that Luton Airport is the busiest airport for this type of aviation. In 2004, the airport handled more than 16,000 private jet visits, the majority of them business trips. The second most frequently visited airport is perhaps a little less surprising. The island of Jersey, with its secretive financial industries, handled only slightly fewer than this figure.
What the figures do clearly show is that the UK’s busiest airports in terms of scheduled commercial traffi, such as Heathrow and Gatwick, are small players in the private aviation market and with good reason.
Mike Farge, chief executive of Southampton-based private jet firm Club 328 www.club328.com, says: “The security problems surrounding major airports and the need to be there at least two hours before means that business people are looking at private jets. With an executive jet you have a really quick turnaround since people are pre-screened - 10 or 20 minutes and you are away.”
Impressive though the private jet figures are, we are on the verge of an explosion in their popularity.
American firm NetJets shook up the private jet market with the introduction 20 years ago of fractional ownership – you get all the benefits of owning a private jet but share the cost of ownership with other like-minded individuals or companies. Suddenly, it was possible to own as little as a sixteenth of the full cost of ownership.
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Since then, the company has also introduced other ideas, such as the Private Jet card, a sort of annual travel pass for executive aviation. With this in your wallet, you can pre-pay for as little as 25 hours of flying time over the course of a year.
Mike Farge’s Club328 is looking at taking this concept a stage further and has this week launched SkyClub, a similar programme to the Private Jet Card concept but with a minimum of just ten hours’ flying time. Under the SkyClub scheme, ten hours of flying time on a six-seater Raytheon Premier 1 jet costs £30,000.
Club 328’s Mike Farge says: “We are building a strong base of regular customers, especially on the corporate side and they are keen to buy into the scheme. Importantly, for all our clients, the scheme will be completely transparent, with no hidden charges. Customers can clearly see what they are going to be charged and receive a monthly statement so there is no ambiguity. They only pay for airborne time.”
The Premier 1 is one of a new generation of very light jets (VLJs) that will see the cost of private jet ownership tumble. Also in the burgeoning VLJ market is the Diamond D-Jet, which its manufacturer hopes to sell for just £500,000 when it launches later this year.
Farge also points out the other benefits of the private jet. “The private jet really comes into its own when you have to make a business trip where you want to visit several cities in a single day – it would be impossible to do that on scheduled services,” he says.
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But with private jets moving into the mainstream, will the cachet evaporate? If chartering a private jet becomes as easy as hailing a taxi, will rock stars and royalty really want to start rubbing shoulders with the common people?
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