Private jets are booming in America. Could Europe be next?

The terminal building at Farnborough that greets celebrities, billionaires and sports stars is surprisingly utilitarian. Yes, there is a concierge who opens your car door on arrival and takes your bags and passport to clear immigration on your behalf. But the grey Hampshire airport has clearly exchanged the trappings of luxury for seamless efficiency.
The $70 million (£55 million) Gulfstream G650 jet that awaits on the tarmac, however, is anything but utilitarian. Bill Gates has two of these; Oprah Winfrey just the one. After boarding and sinking into one of 12 quilted leather seats, champagne is served, the doors are locked and we taxi to the runway, ready to swap Britain’s leaden skies for the sunshine of Venice.
The take-off is rather like being shot out of a cannon, as the two high-thrust Rolls-Royce BR725 AI-12 engines roar into life. “And this isn’t even a speedy take-off,” quipped a seasoned fellow passenger.
Last week there was outcry in some quarters after it emerged that the new boss of Starbucks, Brian Niccol, will commute almost 1,000 miles from his home in Newport Beach, California, to the coffee chain’s headquarters in Seattle on a corporate jet.
Niccol is far from alone. Private flight numbers bounced back sharply during the pandemic: in 2021, they surged 20 per cent above the level in 2019, and have only climbed since.
“Covid has given the whole sector a boost,” said Daniel Riefer, a partner at the consultancy McKinsey. “Many people tried private jets during that time and they felt, ‘Oh, the return on investment is maybe better than I thought. And it’s not as expensive as I feared.’ That created a sort of stickiness.”
The US remains the dominant market, accounting for at least 50 per cent of all these exclusive flights. But with operators on a post-pandemic high, private jet companies such as the Warren Buffett-owned NetJets, and Flexjet, backed by Chelsea football club owner Todd Boehly, now sense an opportunity: to replicate the success of America in Europe. Does the idea have wings?
With only a few wispy clouds interrupting a bright blue sky, it’s a picture-postcard day in Venice as Kenn Ricci, chairman of Flexjet, steps off his river taxi and is greeted by the mâitre’d at the restaurant of the 19th-century Gritti Palace hotel.
It is hard not to be infected by Ricci’s enthusiasm for aviation. He flew in the US military in the 1970s before switching to cargo and then private jets, flying musicians on their months-long tours of the US before becoming Bill Clinton’s long-standing private pilot from 1992.
“I always say there’s two kinds of people in business, right? There’s people that love business and they love transacting — they could sell screws, or they could sell hot dogs,” he said. “And there are some people that are just passionate about the business they’re in. And that’s me.”
Flexjet, which operates a fleet of just over 300 aircraft, is product of a venture that Ricci set up with US defence giant Raytheon in the early 2000s. The company’s fortunes were turbocharged when, with the help of billionaire Boehly, he acquired the private-jet operating arm of Bombardier in 2013.
A failed $3 billion float — designed in part to allow Boehly to cash out his investment — followed in 2023, costing Ricci $30 million in break fees. “I made a mistake. I should’ve never done it,” he said.
Now he plans to break Europe. Yet headwinds abound.
“US corporations and high-net-worth individuals are definitely not subject to pressures in the same way that we are in Europe,” said Oliver Tebbit, an aviation partner at law firm Watson Farley & Williams. “Private jet use in the US is predominantly associated with big businesses that are generating jobs and economically productive activity. So culturally, I think there’s little resistance in the US … But in Europe there are environmental pressures. And much of the rest of the world is slightly puzzled at this.”
An example of this came in June at Stansted airport when Just Stop Oil claimed to have sprayed two private jets owned by Taylor Swift in orange paint — only to find they were not the property of the US pop star. Meanwhile, Ricci admits that Flexjet opted not to put the company’s livery on the front of its London office for fear of reprisals.
He points out that Flexjet gave its customers the option to offset their carbon emissions and no one took it up. “So we flipped it around. We said: ‘Okay, now you have to opt out.’ Do you know how many opted out? Zero.
“Are people going to really stop flying? Is that what we’re going to do? I guess if it is, then I’ll look for something else. We’ll be in the boat business.”
A backlash from climate change campaigners is not the only problem to contend with. For starters, America’s friendly tax environment does not exist in Europe. “If companies spend money on a new private jet, they can claim capital allowances for depreciation, which they can offset against their corporate profits,” Tebbit explained.
Then there are structural issues. “In Europe, there are public transport alternatives — rail, for instance — and that can often be a much better use of your working time,” said one investment banker who has worked on private jet market deals. “Then there is the pure distance. Many European cities are much closer together. Finally, it is the experience. Many American airports can be dreadful.” In Europe, the banker added, airports are of a higher standard, meaning the well-heeled may settle for taking commercial flights with the rest of us.
Lower prices could be enough for travellers on this side of the pond to overlook those objections. Flexjet has pioneered fractional ownership, where customers buy a share — typically, an eighth or a sixteenth — in an aircraft. That fraction could cost them anything from $1.6 million to $5 million, depending on the size of the aircraft.
Customers commit to a five-year term, during which they also pay at least €22,600 (£19,000) a month to ensure there is always an aircraft available, for which they then must pay an additional charge per flight. As a result, many of them rarely fly in the aircraft in which they actually own a share.
After five years, customers can either sell their stake back to Flexjet, keep it and renew, or trade it in against a stake in a different aircraft.
Larger rival NetJets, which billionaire owner Buffett has claimed is “in a class by itself” and has “done what Ferrari has done” for cars, has rolled out its own version of this model.
Vista, ranked third among the private jet operators, is pushing shared charters, where individuals can book an empty seat on a flight — almost like an Uber. This might seem paradoxical, given that private jets are meant to offer a sense of exclusivity and privacy, but it does allow the original customer to lower the cost of their charter while also reducing the per-passenger carbon footprint.
Despite the positive trends for private jet flights, new figures reveal that departures from Europe are 1 per cent down so far in 2024 compared with a year ago. Ricci, however, is the eternal optimist. He points out that it is an error to think of Europe in isolation. With planes such as the G650 able to circumnavigate the globe with just one stop, it makes sense to link up with the wealthy entrepreneurs from oil-rich nations in the Middle East.
“In Europe, what we found is that we have a lot of traffic to the Middle East. Opening the Middle East is a big strategy for us to be able to have enough traffic, because a lot of the Middle East goes to Europe.”
And Ricci has one last pitch to the uber-wealthy: “Remember, when you fly with us, you’re not trackable. If you have a corporate jet, everybody knows the registration number of that jet. Take Elon Musk — everybody knows his number. But when he flies with us, he could be on any one of 300 planes.”