Going private

Only the super-rich can afford to buy them, but a boom in the number of private jet charter companies is affording thousands of wannabe oligarchs a taste of the high life. The question is, do we really need all that pampering? David Woodward finds out

If you're planning on shelling out £25m for a new toy, you'll want to play with it right away. That's where the asset flippers come in. In the hugely popular market for private jets, where some orders take up to five years to fulfil, so-called asset flippers pay the manufacturer a small deposit on a brand new jet, join the queue, then sell the right to buy that jet to the highest bidder before it leaves the production line. It's good old-fashioned, opportunistic brokerage. "It's like buying the latest Ferrari," says Hugh Courtenay, chief executive of International Air Charter. "Brokers order a jet without any intention of keeping it." And for the highest specification jets, they charge anything up to £7m commission. Oligarchs, it seems, don't like to queue.

The toy at the top of most shopping lists is the 564 mph Bombardier Global Express, which can fly non-stop from London to Delhi and refuel in just 15 minutes. With a list price of £24.5m, tyre kickers are generally discouraged, but business moguls and celebrities are welcome to join the five-year queue for the highest-spec model, the XRS-proud owners of which include Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and Newcastle United FC owner Mike Ashley.

The XRS is primarily a business jet, although Bombardier stresses that customers are free to adorn the interior with as much bling as they see fit. Just don't turn to the company's glossy brochure for inspiration. While "the 16 G three-place divan in the aft" might be "fully berthable", that doesn't tell you what colour scheme to follow for the curtains. No matter, says Courtenay, the XRS is the cream of the crop. "There are the Boeing business jets, but that truthfully is just a 737 with different engines, less weight and bigger fuel tanks. Of the private jets," he says, "the Bombardier Global Express is widely recognised as top of the range."

One way to avoid having to jump the queue in the first place is to charter a plane for a specific journey, or even invest in a slice of a jet that's already been paid for—known as fractional ownership. Vanity aside, if you fly less than 75 hours a year, it doesn't make economic sense to buy a jet. Once you've added the cost of crew, hangar fees, maintenance and insurance, the last thing you want to do is leave it on the tarmac. If you fly between 75 and 400 hours a year, fractional ownership starts to make sense. Over 400 hours in the air and outright ownership is a more viable option. But if you want to hit the used-jet market, beware that top-of-the-range second-hand jets can cost up to a third more than the list price of a brand new model.

As more companies compete for the right to get us from A to B, so the price of many services is falling. Taking the highly competitive New York route as an example, it's now possible to charter a private jet for around the same price as a first-class ticket on a commercial airline. Private jet company Cloud 9 charges between £55,000 and £70,000 for a return trip to New York from London, depending on the type of plane you opt for. Even if you plump for the Bombardier, the most expensive, as long as you fill it (for which you'll need 16 rich friends or a larger than average client-entertaining budget) the cost per passenger works out at £4,375, which is only £20 more than a first-class return with British Airways.

But price isn't the only consideration. Time is more often than not the biggest factor in deciding how to fly. And that's where private jets have the edge. There's no need, for example, to turn up two and a half hours before your flight only to spend the majority of that time in a security queue wishing you'd worn matching socks. On a private jet, you can breeze up to the terminal 30 minutes before scheduled departure. Even if you're late, the schedule is built around you, so there's no need to get stressed if you hit traffic on the way to the airport. Going private can also be the better option for those who like to be on time. The Civil Aviation Authority's latest figures on flight punctuality show that between April and June 2007, only 68 per cent of scheduled flights left the UK on time. Even with Heathrow's new Terminal 5 relieving some of the strain, the majority of the country's airports are still under considerable pressure. Conversely, there's little in the way of congestion at smaller airports, such as Biggin Hill, Blackbushe or Fairoaks.

The boom in private jet charter is reflected in the figures. According to the CAA, in the last 10 years the number of passengers on scheduled flights has risen from 114 million a year to 202 million, but the number of charter passengers has grown nearly tenfold, from 3.5 million to 34 million. This is a dangerous and "alarming" rise in traffic, according to environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth. Transport campaigner Richard Dyer calls it an "unsustainable" trend. "If these journeys are essential, and I think there's a question mark about that to start with, it's far better for the environment that they are made on scheduled flights," he says. Even though commerical airlines generally have larger engines, per passenger, the carbon cost of going private can be three to five times higher than the equivalent commercial flight. In any case, Dyer says, "many of these journeys are within Europe, where there is often a good rail alternative."

Many airline operators (both private and scheduled), have responded by allowing passengers to offset their carbon emissions, paid for either as part of the published ticket price, or as an additional option. Fractional-ownership operator Netjets, for example, offers its passengers the chance to offset their emissions through "well-monitored" Verified Emissions Reductions (VERs) from "Kyoto-level" offset projects, and claims its business will be 100 per cent carbon neutral by 2012. Cloud9 claims to be carbon neutral already, and offsets "at its expense" all the carbon emissions for all flights. British Airways recently "upgraded" its offset scheme, offering passengers the chance to offset their emissions and help finance wind farms in China and Brazil.

Critics say offsetting is more about guilt-transfer than any real concern for the environment. Dyer calls offsetting "highly questionable" and "barely better than doing nothing". He adds that with offset schemes that promise tree planting, "there is no guarantee that you can protect the tree for the requisite number of years, or stop them from being burnt or chopped down." As a result, he says, it's questionable, that these schemes actually have a positive effect.

"Even with the regulated schemes under the Kyoto protocol, studies have shown that a lot of those projects would have happened anyway," says Dyer. "There's a lot of false accounting going on, so you can never be sure that you're actually offsetting your emissions." But BA's head of corporate responsibility, Silla Maizey, defends the airline's approach: "Offsetting is closely related to emissions trading. It is valuable in itself and improves general understanding of how carbon trading works," she says.

Courtenay is not only sceptical as to how green a private jet can be, he also suggests that the green credentials of its passengers are dubious. He questions whether passengers care about the environment as much as the operators say they do. "If a customer is thinking about buying or chartering a jet, they are more concerned with the hours that it will fly without a fuel stop and the cost of operating it. I've never had a client ask me the question about carbon cost."

Compare flights to New York

Compare travel to Paris

Compare flights to Mumbai