This article originally ran in Sherwood News on July 29, 2024.
For fans of private-jet travel, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news first: the industry is thriving, as a wave of high-net-worth individuals have discovered the pleasures of being able to fly when you want, where you want, and how you want, no matter the price. Sales of private jets are booming, and charter companies are lavishing clients with add-ons that range from private chefs and in-flight wellness exercises to meetings with a Tibetan lama.
The bad news: the entire industry faces imminent extinction thanks to regulatory pressure and political opposition amid global efforts to stem the climate crisis. “We have to push for a ban on private jets,” French climate activist Charlène Fleury told me. “This is the most polluting and the most unfair and the least necessary mode of transport.”
For a taste of the happy side of flying privately, I recently joined a gaggle of journalists for an orientation flight with VistaJet, a company that sells blocks of flight time in private aircraft. On a late spring day, we board a Bombardier Global 7500, one of 18 that the company owns. One of the largest purpose-built private jets in the sky, the Global 7500 seats up to 19 and features a kitchen and crew suite for long-haul flights (it can fly more than 8,000 miles) as well a full-sized bed in a stateroom at the back of the aircraft, which comes with an extra-long seatbelt across the middle. A plane like this is not for everyone. “The average net worth of the customers who use this plane is $1 billion,” Leona Qi, VistaJet’s President of US operations, said as we carved $10,000-an-hour circles over a cloudy New England while picking at a selection of amuse-gueules.
One gets the feeling that a private jet is an oversized stretch limo with a much better view. A moving map display on the wall of the plane gives you an uncanny awareness of the fact that you could put your finger on any arbitrary spot on planet Earth and be there by this time tomorrow. My in-flight reverie was interrupted by a flight attendant offering a selection of artisanal chocolates. The company boasts that its flight attendants are trained at the British Butler Institute and its kitchen staff includes a chef who used to work at Nobu.
This level of luxury is a fairly recent development in private-jet travel. When the category was first invented, courtesy of Bill Lear’s eight-passenger Learjet 23 in 1964, its purpose was to shuttle executives from one meeting to the next. While the aura of privilege was unmistakable, the justification was primarily economic: by allowing them to fly exactly where they needed to go, exactly when they needed to go, companies could save their expensive time. “Thirty years ago, the lion’s share of aircraft owners were governments and corporations,” Jeff Habib said, a managing partner at the Intercontinental Aircraft Group brokerage. The furnishings and service were, accordingly, rather restrained.
Then came decades of income inequality that created a new cohort of wealthy individuals who valued their own private time as exorbitantly as a corporation might value a CEO’s. “There was definitely a market shift connected directly to the tremendous amount of wealth creation, not only here in the US but around the world,” Habib said. The worldwide fleet of private jets has more than doubled since 2000. According to Habib, 60% of the market consists of high-net-worth individuals who use the planes both for their own business and for pleasure.
Devotees say that flying private is so much better than commercial — even in first class — that once tasted, you can never go back. It’s not just the luxury trimmings, or the fact that you can bring as much luggage as you want, that your pets can ride with you, or that VistaJet will provide a clown to entertain the kids. It’s that you’re wafting through the world in a bubble, out of sight of the throngs who populate commercial aviation. VistaJet calls the various mundane interactions with other people — checking your bags, waiting in line, passing through security, asking a seatmate whether they mind if you climb over them to get to the lavatory —“touch points,” and says that when you fly private you’ll have to deal with just 20 of them, compared to 700 when you fly commercial.
And the time you do spend in the air is enjoyed with a level of cosseting that matches what you’re used to on the ground. VistaJet’s chefs, for instance, will liaise with a customer’s personal kitchen staff to ensure they get the same ingredients, recipes, and presentations that they’re used to at home. “Our clients’ lifestyle is not disrupted,” Qi said.
Perhaps the ultimate service that VistaJet offers is to rent planes their customers don’t even use. Many of their clients, Qi said, already own a jet but want to have a backup to travel along with them in case something goes wrong with the first one. If you’re granted a half-hour meeting with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, she explained, the opportunity to close a business deal is worth the expense of having an empty plane fly behind you on the way there.
There’s a price for all this, of course, and not just the tens of thousands of dollars per hour it can cost to operate an $80 million aircraft. Jet travel produces significant externalities, in particular carbon emissions, that the rest of us must bear. Jaunts to Ibiza or Gstaad may be fun for those who participate, but they play an outsized role in cooking the earth.
All aviation is bad for carbon emissions. If air transport were a country, it would rank among the top 10 emitters in the world. But private aviation is seen as especially problematic because it produces up to 14 times as much carbon per passenger. This is partly because private jets rarely travel at full capacity; though Vista’s jets seat between 8 and 14 passengers, the average number aboard any given flight is just 2.3.
Heavy private-jet users can produce truly astonishing quantities of CO2. One study by UK digital-marketing firm Yard named Taylor Swift the biggest celebrity CO2 polluter of 2022 thanks to her frequent private-jet trips, which together produced over 1,000 times more carbon dioxide than the average person creates in a year. Another heavy flyer is Elon Musk, who bought a new jet and took 141 flights in 2022, burning nearly a million liters of kerosene in the process. Though Swift and Musk may be unusually profligate, there are many others who are nearly as bad. All told, 1% of the world’s population creates 50% of the world’s aviation greenhouse gases.
“The top 1%, or even less, are burning up our planet just so they can save three hours,” Omar Ocampo, a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies, said. “I don’t think that’s a really good trade-off.”
Protests against private jets have been growing. Last May, 100 climate protesters broke through security at a private-jet convention in Geneva and swarmed a static display of aircraft, where amid the ensuing melee, several managed to handcuff themselves to planes before being hauled off by police. “We wanted to protest and expose that they were selling and buying private jets in the middle of a climate crisis,” Fleury said, who took part in the demonstration.
Such protests have become common in Europe and are now happening in the US, too. Last July, activists blocked the entrance of East Hampton airport to protest private jets. Among the 13 arrested was Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Walt Disney’s brother, Roy. “The last thing this planet needs is billionaires spewing greenhouse gases to get to their palatial beach homes,” she tweeted later. “Just so wrong.”
Even Swift herself is feeling the heat. This June, two protestors cut through a chain-link fence and spray-painted two jets at London’s Stansted airport, where they believed Swift’s $54 million Dassault Falcon 7X had just landed. (They were mistaken, and tagged planes that had no connection to Swift.)
All these protests will ultimately have little effect without real political power coalescing behind them. “Unless you have intervention from the regulatory authorities in the government, it’s going to be really difficult to move away from the world we live in today, with its dependence on carbon fuels,” Nuno Taborda said, CEO of aircraft-parts manufacturer MagniX.
There are certainly real signs that that’s starting to happen. Here and there, governments and industry organizations around the world — including some with a direct interest in a healthy private-jet industry — are pushing for change. The International Air Transport Association adopted the goal of net-zero CO2 emissions in 2021; in 2022, the International Civil Air Association (ICAO) followed suit. In 2021, the US Transportation Department released the US Aviation Climate Action Plan, which envisions a multipronged approach to achieve zero net carbon emissions in the country’s aviation sector by 2050.
This leaves us with 26 years left on the clock. How these goals are met — whether they are met — is going to depend on policies adopted in the immediate future. Europe is further along than the US in this regard. In 2021, France passed a law that forbids any domestic jet flight that could be taken by rail in less than 2.5 hours. The plan caused a small reductionin greenhouse-gas emissions, and Spain is now planning a similar law. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is considering banning all private jets “no later than 2025-26” on the grounds that they generate a disproportionate amount of noise and greenhouse-gas emissions. The UK Green Party, French Green Party, and Greenpeace all want to ban private jets entirely.
While no one is pushing for such radical steps in the US yet, the Overton window is already shifting. Last year, Massachusetts Sen. Edward J. Markey and New York Rep. Nydia Velázquez introduced a measure that would increase taxes on aviation fuel for private jets by nearly tenfold. In an accompanying statement, Markey said, “It’s time to ground these fat cats and make them pay their fair share.”
That particular bill went nowhere, but as climate change continues to intensify and social and political pressure grows, it’s hard to imagine how private jets will be able to continue operating in any way like they do now. Somehow, the contradictions will have to resolve — and what lies in store may be something as yet inconceivable today. Someday, perhaps, billionaires may be forced to fly commercial.
If there’s a way to escape such a lamentable future, it will be through the development of a technology that lets jets fly as they do today, but without the attendant environmental damage. That won’t be easy. Compared to other transportation sectors, aviation is inherently difficult to electrify because planes have to exert energy in order to move their fuel through the air. Today’s batteries are just so heavy — pound for pound, they carry one-sixth as much energy as fossil fuel — that electric planes have extremely limited range, on the order of minutes rather than hours.
That means that while a wealthy person can swap their gas-guzzling Maserati for an electric Rimac Nevera, there’s no equivalent move in aviation. There are no such things as electric airliners that can travel across the Atlantic Ocean, and there may never be. It’s just physics.
A more practical-sounding alternative is to keep using the same engines that planes today use, but swap out their fossil-fuel kerosene for something carbon-neutral. Such a fuel already exists. So-called Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is chemically similar to the fuel burned by jet engines today, but can be derived from biological sources like cooking oil or agricultural waste, which don’t add net carbon to the atmosphere.
The Biden administration has been promoting SAF with a variety of initiatives, including a tax credit for the production of fuels that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 50%. In a statement, the White House declared that these measures “are essential to unlocking the potential for a fully zero-carbon aviation sector by 2050.” VistaJet is ramping up its use of SAF, contracting for 200,000 gallons in 2022 and 4 million in 2023.
But critics say SAF not only isn’t an effective way to combat climate change — it can actually make things worse. In a 2024 paper, “Greenwashing the Skies,” researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies make the case that turning corn into jet fuel could actually result in a net increase in greenhouse gases. “Where are you going to get the feedstocks in order to produce this fuel?” Ocampo, one of the report’s co-authors, asked. “This requires land. If you cut down a forest to clear the land, you’re going to take away something that removes and stores carbon from the atmosphere. This actually undermines our climate goals in the long term.” Worse, by creating a false impression that positive steps are being taken, SAF could undercut the public’s sense of urgency in looking for truly viable solutions.
According to Ocampo, even if relying on SAF to fight climate change was a workable strategy, the aviation industry has failed again and again to live up to its commitments. “In 2007, they said by 2017 10% of fuel burned would be sustainable aviation fuels,” he said. “What it actually was, was 0.01%.” The industry’s track record hasn’t improved much since then. In 2014, the industry revised its goals to aim for 3% of all jet fuel to be sustainable by 2020. Instead it was 0.03%. To reach the levels necessary to meet the 2050 decarbonization goal, production would have to ramp up by 227,400% from 2022 levels.
Given the scale of the problem, it’s hard to see how even the most earnest jet operator can claim to operate in a sustainable way. VistaJet, for instance, may be striving in all sincerity to thoughtfully minimize its carbon emissions, but if there isn’t enough SAF to go around then continuing to operate will mean continuing to contribute to the climate crisis.
While Ocampo and his colleagues despair of the aviation industry weaning itself off fossil fuels in the necessary time frame, they don’t want to get rid of private jets entirely. “There are legitimate uses for flying private,” he said, such as flying sick patients to treatment they can’t get locally, or even getting an executive to an important meeting. But gratuitous flights, like flying coast to coast and back for a single board meeting, are unjustifiable and unsustainable, and some means of preventing them must be found. “We should be limiting or disincentivizing the use of private aircraft,” Ocampo said. He suggests financial carrots and sticks, such as increased fuel taxes for private jets and surcharges for flights of less that 210 miles.
Even modest surcharges would be a big change from current practice, in which the US government effectively subsidizes private jets. Although they make up one-sixth of all the air traffic in the US, private jets only contribute about 2% of the taxes that fund the FAA.
It would make sense to charge jet owners more, but aircraft owners have repeatedly used their wealth and power to beat back efforts to impose fees and taxes on them. Under President Donald Trump — not coincidentally the first US president to own his own private jet — the government even passed a substantial tax break for plane ownership. Today, private-jet owners pay 87% less than commercial passengers do in aviation taxes and fees.
Given the rising sense of urgency worldwide, you might expect to see the private-jet industry pull in its horns and try to move, somehow, toward lessening its impact on the planet — perhaps by shifting to smaller, more efficient planes that fly slower and lower to minimize their environmental damage.
That’s not happening. Instead, manufacturers are moving in the other direction, seeking to set themselves apart by building jets that go further and faster than the competition. The newest model of Gulfstream, the G700, is the company’s fastest ever, with a top speed of Mach 0.935 and a range of nearly 9,000 miles. Next year Bombardier will start delivering its newest plane, the Global 8000, which will be even brawnier than the G700, with a top speed of Mach 0.94 and a range of 9,200 miles.
Impressive as those capabilities may be, they pale in comparison to those of designs currently on the blackboard. One Boston startup, Spike Aerospace, says it’s developing a supersonic business jet that’ll be able to carry 18 passengers at Mach 1.6, or about 1,100 mph, roughly twice as fast as a conventional airliner. Denver-based Boom Technology, meanwhile, is planning a small supersonic airliner that could serve as a business jet and has already started test-flying a prototype. If either aircraft ever enters service, the fuel burn will be extraordinary, as plowing through the atmosphere at supersonic velocities is an inherently inefficient process. By Boom’s own calculations, Overture will burn two to three times as much fuel per passenger as a conventional jet.
Does that vision of the future make sense in a world that’s already 1.3 degrees C warmer than it was in 1900? The question cannot linger unanswered for long. As the deadline for ICAO’s net-zero goal draws nearer, we’re approaching the collision of an irresistible force (growing global demands for action on the climate crisis) with an immovable object (the needs of the wealthy to do what they want, how they want to do it).
Maybe the wealthy and powerful will do what they’ve traditionally done when confronted with efforts to curtail their privilege, and simply make sure the rules are rewritten to their advantage. Certainly, there are some within the aviation industry that expect that to happen. One recent poll, in fact, found that less than half of aviation executives thought the industry would meet its goal by 2050.
Perhaps the threat to collective welfare is so frightening that the political will exists to take away the wealthy’s toys. Judging by the number of people who are willing to get arrested, the intensity of public outrage should not be underestimated. But is it enough? “The superrich will not bear the brunt of climate change; they will be able to protect themselves from it,” Fleury said. “It’s clearly super unfair.”