Fancy fliers are creating a huge boom in private-jet travel, no longer the exclusive province of Fortune 500 companies, Donald Trump, or Taylor Swift. Yet for all the allure of flying private, it’s a rather dangerous luxury.
This article originally ran in Vanity Fair on January 29, 2025.
THEY CALLED HER Gypset. The name, a combination of gypsy and jet set, wasn’t one she’d come up with herself; she’d gotten it from the writer Julia Chaplin, who coined the term in her 2009 book, Gypset Style, to evoke the vibe of bright young things who waft from Sayulita to Tangier to Topanga Canyon, crafting eclectic necklaces and draping yurts with Hermès cashmere. Athletic and glamorously bohemian, with glacial blue eyes and a silver ring in her nose, Gypset embodied her nickname’s ideal, always flying off to go skiing or hang out backstage at a rock show.
Her given name was Lindsey Gleiche. She was 31 and lived in Huntington Beach, California, a short walk to the Pacific surf. Being a gypset is an occupation best suited for the independently wealthy, and Gleiche wasn’t that; she had a normal job, designing websites for Dollar General. But she was beautiful, friendly, and free-spirited.
In mid-2022, she met a man five years her junior, Riese Lenders, on a ski trip to Mammoth. Lenders was a pilot who was building his flight experience in Cessnas, turboprops, and small jets. He took her on jaunts to Las Vegas to see shows; to Arizona for her birthday; to the Bay Area for more music.
It was an intense but short-lived relationship. The two called it quits in spring 2023, but they continued to see each other occasionally, as exes sometimes do. On a Friday night in July, Gleiche was in her apartment getting ready to have dinner by herself when her phone rang. It was Lenders. He was about to take a spur-of-the-moment flight to Las Vegas with two older couples. The relationship was personal and professional—Lenders was working for Manuel Vargas, but the two were also friends. Perhaps that’s why Lenders was allowed to ask Gleiche if she wanted to tag along—they could make a night of it, hit some bars, and then fly home. What did she think?
She said yes right away. It was a nearly two-hour drive across the mountains to get to French Valley, the airstrip Lenders was departing from—a slog, but better than sitting at home on a Friday night.
The plane, a white Cessna Citation II jet with red and tan speed stripes, took off at 9:18 p.m. from the exurbs on the far side of the coastal mountains. Lenders, the pilot in command, sat in the front-left seat. To his right was his copilot, 32-year-old Vargas. Vargas had a successful real estate and landscaping business and flew helicopters, jets, and prop planes for both business and pleasure. He and his wife, Abby, had five kids, ranging in age from 1 to 14, and lived in a sprawling compound in Temecula. Abby was sitting in the back of the plane with Gleiche and the other couple, Alma, 51, and Abe Razick, 48. The Razicks had seven kids and owned several car dealerships in California and Arizona.
The plane touched down at 10:04 p.m. at Harry Reid International Airport, and the group headed north to the Strip. Gleiche and Lenders made their way to the Allē Lounge on 66, a wood-paneled bar in the Conrad hotel at Resorts World. Lenders had a drink, but by FAA regulation, he shouldn’t have had any. Gleiche was under no such restrictions, and by the time the group headed back to the airport, she was buzzed enough to be over the DUI limit. So were Manny and Abby Vargas. The Razicks had enough alcohol in them to be on the verge of passing out.
At 3:04 a.m., while they were waiting to take off, Gleiche texted her friend Lindsay Mausner a picture she’d taken looking out over the Strip. “Love that someone’s awake because Vegas also never sleeps,” Gleiche wrote cryptically.
On the East Coast, Mausner wasn’t awake, though, and the text she read in the morning marked the last time she ever heard from her friend.
FLYING PRIVATE has always held an edgy allure—it is “a true satanic temptation,” as former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown recently declared in her Substack. “I am convinced it’s the single most seductive experience in the world,” she wrote. “You realize there is no one you wouldn’t kill, betray, or sleep with to ensure a lifetime of luxe relief from the armpit of mass transit.” Personally owned or chartered jets are potent signifiers of over-the-top wealth, redolent of exclusivity and power, yet they evoke all of the darker aspects of that privilege. There’s no better way to encapsulate your status in 30 seconds of cell phone video than to show yourself sliding into a Gulfstream at Teterboro and sliding out at Ibiza’s private-jet terminal. You’ll also be embodying extreme inequality and destroying the environment.
And over the past few years, owing in part to the pandemic, PJs have morphed from a mysterious elite privilege into an object of popular fascination and marginally more widespread accessibility. Where commercial aviation has been making headlines for all of its chaosand agita, PJs seem to offer freedom and comfort. And though they were once mainly tasked with shuttling executives around, jets are now used by wealthy individuals like the family station wagon. “It’s all about the creature comforts that Mr. and Mrs. Hedgefund have grown accustomed to,” one aircraft broker told me. “These jets are being marketed as pieds-à-terre in the sky.”
They are also unmistakable markers of status. Anyone can flaunt a Dior bag or splurge on a dinner at Per Se, but if your ride is a Gulfstream, you are the real thing. When Donald Trump isn’t flying Air Force One (a modified 747 jumbo jet), he flies a 757 with his name painted on the side. Elon Musk flies multiple Gulfstreams (and is famously tetchy about the fact that they are publicly tracked). Taylor Swift owns a Dassault Falcon but also charters other jets. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt enjoys his Gulfstream so much that, on average, he flies more than once per day and spends one sixth of his total time flying. Celebrities love to flex on TikTok with images of themselves sitting on jets; a subtler way to signal your belonging is to drop the name of one of the FBOs, or fixed-base operators, providing lounges and concierge service at private aviation terminals, such as Million Air, Signature, and Jet Aviation. “There is no greater hazard than the offer of a Gulfstream to foster dubious associations,” Brown wrote in her newsletter, mentioning the private-jet usage of the Obamas, the late Barbara Walters, and President Bill Clinton (now publicly remorseful he partook of Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, as did Donald Trump).
The one thing flying private doesn’t offer is more safety. In most things the ultrarich are much more protected than the rest of us. They even live longer. But when it comes to air travel, those who fly private are actually at a significant disadvantage. There hasn’t been a fatal commercial crash in the United States since 2009, when a commuter flight crashed on approach to Buffalo, New York. Meanwhile, private jets have suffered an average of three fatal crashes per year, most of which have killed everyone on board, over the last five years in the United States, according to a federal accident database. (The terms private jet and business jet refer to any turbine engine aircraft that isn’t used for scheduled airline flights, with most such aircraft being smaller than regional jets and seating between 4 and 19 passengers.)
Why is the jet-set life, with all its promise of exclusivity and freedom, so much more hazardous? The answer lies in how wealthy people are allowed to take investment risks that average people aren’t. Because they’re considered sophisticated, it’s assumed that they understand the hazards and can bear the consequences. Likewise, if you have your own plane, you’re in a position to check for yourself and gauge whether it is safe. Commercial passengers, by contrast, can’t be expected to assess the safety of their air carrier. “The job of the [Federal Aviation Administration] is to protect the unknowing public,” says Fred Lee, a former pilot who conducts seminars about air-charter operations with the agency, which is responsible for regulating all nonmilitary aviation in the United States (though the military does follow FAA rules when operating in national airspace).
Sophisticated customers, in other words, are expected to understand the dangers, so the rules can be looser. If they make a dumb decision, that’s on them. The thing is that, if you give people the opportunity to make bad decisions, it won’t be long before some of them do.
In March 2023, Dana Hyde and her husband, Jonathan Chambers,took their teenage son, Elijah, on a two-day trip to New England to look at colleges. The pair were something of a Washington power couple. Hyde, 55, was a lawyer who worked in the Obama White House and then was tapped to head the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a government-funded development agency. Chambers was a former Federal Communications Commission official who wrote rules there for cable-TV providers, then left to join a consulting company.
Driving to New Hampshire would have taken eight hours, but Chambers’s company had a corporate jet, a super midsize-class Bombardier Challenger 300 that comfortably sat up to nine passengers (another well-known Bombardier aficionado is Swift, who frequently flies on a Bombardier Global 6000). The model had a good safety record, but the pilots had limited experience in the aircraft type, with each having less than 100 hours of flying time in it. “Normally, if one guy’s a newbie, you’d want to have one guy with at least 100 hours,” says Mark Beaumont, a retired pilot who flew Citation jets. “But if you don’t have that luxury, and it’s allowable within the regulations, well, that’s what you’ve got.” (As a private pilot myself, I can attest that becoming fluent in all of the nuances of a particular aircraft is very helpful for safety and takes time to master.)
Inexperienced pilots have become a prominent hazard of flying private. The surge in PJ popularity has run headlong into a conflicting trend: a shortage of skilled pilots. The military trains far fewer aviators than it once did, and fewer young people dream of the skies. Meanwhile, airlines have raised salaries, luring pilots from smaller operators. “The situation has been years in the making, and it is incredibly challenging,” says Sheryl Barden, CEO of the recruiting agency Aviation Personnel International. “You can’t make a pilot overnight—and we didn’t make them for so long, and now we have a big gap.”
Pilots who once would have happily spent their careers flying private jets are instead getting pulled up into the airlines as soon as they’ve logged the required number of hours, leaving behind those with less stick time. And that has safety implications. “It’s like a teenager driving your car,” says Barden. “You’ve had so much more experience, and that gives you situational awareness and knowledge. That doesn’t mean every teenage driver is a bad driver. They just don’t have the same level of experience.”
A large proportion of private-jet accidents in recent years have involved careless piloting of a type that is rarely seen in commercial aviation. In 2021 the pilots of a Challenger landing in Truckee, California, rushed their landing unnecessarily, lost control of their airspeed, and corkscrewed into the ground. Almost two months later, a Citation crashed while trying to take off from Farmington, Connecticut, because the pilot forgot to disengage the parking brake. In January of 2023, an Embraer Phenom light jet veered off the centerline during takeoff, wobbled in midair, and crashed after hurrying to depart from Provo, Utah, before a snowstorm, killing the pilot.
As Hyde and her family readied for takeoff from Dillant-Hopkins Airport in Keene, New Hampshire, on March 3, their pilots gave off hints that they weren’t fully on the ball. According to the preliminary accident report, during the standard preflight inspection, they failed to notice a bright red cover had remained in place over the pitot tube, a probe that measures the aircraft’s speed (and whose malfunction famously caused an Air France crash over the Atlantic in 2009). Only after they’d started accelerating down the runway for takeoff did they see that their speed wasn’t registering on the instrument panel. They aborted the takeoff, and the captain got out to remove the cover.
The second takeoff attempt was successful, and the plane climbed as it headed south. But just two minutes into the flight, the control panel began to light up with a slew of warnings, including “AP STAB TRIM FAIL” and “AP HOLDING NOSE DOWN.” The pilots didn’t fully understand what was happening, but the system designed to even out aerodynamic forces in the plane’s tail wasn’t operating correctly, and so the autopilot was struggling to hold the plane’s nose down.
Over the next six minutes, the plane continued to climb as the pilots struggled to figure out what was going on. In emergencies, pilots are trained to refer to checklists that give step-by-step instructions of what to do. Unfortunately, in this case, the copilot pulled the wrong one. Its first item was to disengage the autopilot, but when they did that, the nose shot up, like a tug-of-war contestant whose opponent had suddenly dropped the rope. Alarmed, the pilots pushed the nose back down again, then jerked it back up again when the plane plunged too steeply.
Back in the passenger cabin, Chambers was strapped into his seat, but Hyde wasn’t, according to the final accident report. As the plane porpoised violently, Hyde must have been thrown around the cabin. In the few seconds it took the pilots to regain control, she sustained fatal blunt force trauma. The plane made an emergency landing at Bradley International Airport, near Hartford, where an ambulance met the plane and rushed her to the hospital. Hyde died that evening.
At least Hyde and Chambers had at their disposal a relatively new and top-of-the-line aircraft. Many private fliers don’t. The lower end of the market is dominated by smaller, less technologically advanced aircraft, many of them quite old. And as the accident data makes quite clear, the smaller and older the plane, the higher the risk.
Planes like a seven-passenger Cessna CitationJet Model 525 cost $6 million new, but a 44-year-old model like the one that Gleiche boarded can go for $500,000 or even less. What you get is a plane whose navigation equipment is generations older and less capable, whose airframe has withstood decades of use, and which is often flown by less experienced pilots. All of that affects safety. Since the start of 2020, there have been 16 fatal private-jet incidents in the United States, according to the federal database, with almost half of them involving Citations, which make up just one third of the private-jet market—and of those involved in incidents, the average age of the aircraft was 33 years.
A separate risk factor associated with Citations is that most of them can be flown by a single pilot. That makes them more affordable to operate, but can be dangerous if the pilot has a problem in flight. In January of 2021, 72-year-old Richard Boehlke was flying his Citation alone over Oregon when he apparently fell unconscious and stopped responding to air traffic control. The plane fell into a spiral descent and crashed into mountainous terrain. Crash investigators noted that while the pilot suffered from no diagnosed medical condition, his “age, gender, high blood pressure, and hypertension placed him at risk for a heart attack or stroke.”
Something similar might have happened in one of the most widely publicized crashes of last year. On June 4, a Citation carrying 49-year-old Adina Azarian, her two-year-old daughter, Aria, and Aria’s nanny, Evadnie Smith, took off from an airstrip in rural Tennessee and headed north toward Long Island. In the cockpit was a single pilot, Jeff Hefner, a 69-year-old former airline captain who’d flown more than 25,000 hours for Southwest before hitting mandatory retirement age.
How Azarian had come to be on the flight was a strange tale. A prominent commercial real estate broker in New York City and the Hamptons, she had met John and Barbara Rumpel, wealthy Republican donors from Florida, after they’d inherited a commercial building on Irving Place. The Rumpels took a shine to Azarian because she reminded them of their own daughter, Victoria, who had died in 1994 at the age of 19 in a freak scuba accident. Victoria and Azarian would have been around the same age, and the Rumpels saw an uncanny resemblance. It wasn’t enough to be friends; the Rumpels legally adopted Azarian, even though she was 40 years old, self-supporting, and had a living mother.
Azarian desperately wanted to have a child of her own and spent three years undergoing fertilization treatments before finally succeeding in giving birth to Aria in 2020. The Rumpels bought a 23-year-old Citation and assigned Hefner to fly it. The plane made it easier for Azarian and Aria to visit them at one of their homes in North Carolina. On June 1, the jet took its first flight up to Long Island, picked up Azarian, her daughter, and the nanny, and zipped them to North Carolina. After a four-day visit, the three boarded the plane to return to New York.
Fifteen minutes after takeoff, as the plane climbed through 32,500 feet, air traffic control asked Hefner to level off at 33,000 feet. He did not reply. The plane climbed to 34,000 feet and followed the route programmed into its autopilot. Once it reached Long Island, the plane turned onto the heading for Long Island MacArthur Airport. Instead of descending, it continued to fly in a straight line toward the Southwest, a course that took it directly over downtown Washington, DC. The Air Force scrambled six F-16 fighters from three bases to intercept, their sonic booms shaking windows below. When the pilots reached the Citation, they saw Hefner slumped overin the cockpit. Soon after, the Citation ran out of fuel, entered a spiraling dive, and crashed into a forest in central Virginia.
Speculation as to why Hefner fell unconscious has focused on two possible causes. One is that, being an older man like Boehlke, he suffered a sudden, overwhelming medical event. If that’s the case, then the three passengers in the back plausibly remained oblivious right up until the fatal descent, since they made no attempt to call for help.
Another explanation is that the aging jet might have suffered a mechanical failure, such as a faulty valve or a malfunctioning pressure seal, that caused the cabin to depressurize as it climbed to altitude. In that case, the lack of oxygen would have caused everyone on board to pass out in a matter of seconds.
Speaking to reporters after the crash, John Rumpel said that a depressurization would mercifully have put his daughter and granddaughter gently to sleep. “That’s the end of my family,” a grief-stricken Rumpel told The Washington Post. “It’s just my wife and I now.”
THERE’S A FINAL factor that makes commercial aviation safer than private-jet travel: the rules. Strict government regulations enumerated in hundreds of pages of fine print cover everything from the stowing of tray tables to announcements concerning lavatory smoke detectors. Private jets operate under less stringent sets of rules. One set applies to flights conducted for personal use, without any paying passengers. These so-called Part 91 rules have very few restrictions. The Hyde and Azarian crashes were both Part 91 because they were flying in jets that belonged to their family or company. Another set, called Part 135, governs air-charter operations. Part 135 rules are stricter, requiring, for example, that operators obtain a document called an air carrier certificate, which ensures that the aircraft meet minimum standards. The rules also limit the number of hours that pilots can fly per day. A pilot flying with a copilot can fly no more than 10 hours at a stretch, for instance, while an airline pilot can fly no more than eight.
Though lax compared to commercial-aviation regulations, Part 135 rules can still be costly to comply with, and unscrupulous operators are often tempted to skirt them, for instance by skipping the lengthy process of obtaining certification. A few years ago the FAA teamed up with the National Air Transportation Association, an aviation industry trade group, to create the Safe Air Charter Team to better inform pilots and passengers about how “illegal air charter operations pose a serious safety hazard to the traveling public.” Nevertheless, the problem has continued to worsen, especially during the pandemic, with the FAA investigating more than a hundred cases each year from 2020 to 2022. “Unfortunately, there have been so many really clever people who have tried to find subtle ways to circumvent 135 regulations that the FAA has had to be increasingly crafty in coming up with ways to stop them,” says Lee, the former pilot.
According to documents filed with the FAA, the plane that Lenders and Vargas were flying that night was one of several belonging to a man named Michael Morris of Imperial, California. Morris told the Associated Press that Vargas was the “manager and lead pilot of his flight company” and that he’d agreed to lend the plane to him because he knew Vargas “was responsible.”
Vargas “was my pilot for two years,” Morris told me when I reached him by phone. He described Vargas as a “great guy” and Lenders as a “wonderful kid,” then declined to talk further due to pending legal action.
In early 2022, Lenders flew to Virginia for prepurchase inspections of three aircraft that Morris was in the process of buying from a company called Central Virginia Aviation. “Riese flew two or three times. We hung out a little bit at the airport,” says Dennis Harrup,who worked with Lenders and Vargas on the sale. One thing that stuck in Harrup’s memory was Lenders’s description of the long hours he was flying. “I remember him telling me how tired they get—‘I’m running ragged,’” Harrup recalls. And Lenders was happy about it: “He’s excited because he’s building twin-turbine time, which is what any young pilot dreams of.”
“He would say that he had been up for, like, three days straight,” says Mari Bolton, a friend of Gleiche and Lenders. “I’m thinking, Wait a minute, don’t they have, like, regulations about this? I’m so confused. How is this happening?”
In quick succession, Central Virginia Aviation sold Morris three airplanes—two Citations and a turboprop King Air. “I assumed they had a lot of charter business,” Harrup says.
AS THE CITATION crossed back over the Mojave Desert, Lenders dialed up the automatic weather-reporting system for French Valley. What he heard wasn’t good. He had been planning to land under visual flight rules, meaning he would just navigate to the runway by sight, but within the last few minutes, fog had pushed in from the coast. Visibility was now only three quarters of a mile, with clouds hovering just 300 feet overhead. Lenders would need to rely on his navigational instruments to guide him. He radioed air traffic control and filed a new flight plan. He’d had to deal with conditions like this before and knew the procedure well. But things were different now. It was late; he was tired; he’d had at least one drink, and his copilot was legally intoxicated. He had a load of passengers in the back whose Friday-night euphoria was turning into Saturday-morning hangover.
They descended into the clouds, the beacon on the tail sending flashes through the enveloping gloom. A thousand feet, 800 feet, 500 feet. Lenders peered through gloom looking for the runway. The plane had reached its decision altitude of 250 feet, the minimum altitude beyond which a pilot may not descend without the runway in sight. According to the last weather report he’d heard, he should have been out of the clouds by now, but in the meantime the clouds had gotten lower and thicker. Unable to see anything, Lenders gave up his attempt to land and performed what’s called a “missed approach,” throttling up the engines and climbing back up into the night.
When a pilot can’t land at an airport due to unfavorable weather, the next step is to find a nearby airport where conditions are better. The nearest alternative at the moment was Hemet-Ryan Airport, 13 miles to the northeast. From there it would be a half-hour Uber ride to French Valley Airport, where everyone’s cars were parked.
There was also another option: to go around and try again. Writes aviation-safety expert Ian Twombly: “Many pilots have crashed trying to re-fly the same approach, no doubt after convincing themselves the ceiling or visibility was going to somehow rapidly improve.”
Whether or not he understood the danger, Lenders opted to go again. He banked into a right-hand turn, then leveled off and began his second descent. Once again he plunged into the clouds and watched the altimeter tick downward as he slid toward the runway.
The altimeter ticked down to the decision altitude. Lenders decided.
The Citation impacted a gully 800 feet short of the runway. Lenders and Vargas were killed instantly. The broken fuselage tumbled forward another 100 feet into a field of scrubby grass. The impact threw the pilots’ bodies another 200 feet, where they came to rest on a roadway, still strapped in their seats. The other passengers’ bodies were scattered closer to the fuselage, which was quickly engulfed in flames fueled by spilled kerosene.
THE NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD issued a preliminary report on the French Valley crash in August 2023. It noted that by the time Lenders made his second landing attempt, a thick fog over the runway had made the chances of success essentially zero. It made no mention of illegal air-charter operations or the effects of fatigue. That kind of detail is typically left for the full report, which takes a year or more to complete.
But there’s a limit to how effective government action can be. No agency can mandate that people use good judgment. The spate of recent private-jet crashes have revealed a lot about a mode of travel that is otherwise so cloaked in privacy. Often, it turns out, the purpose of the flight turns out to be strikingly inconsequential. Adina Azarian flew to spend four days with her adoptive parents. Dana Hyde was on a two-day trip to look at colleges. Lindsey Gleiche was looking for something to do on a Friday night. You have to wonder: Would these people have made those trips that way if they’d understood their choice to be one of risk over inconvenience?
“The normalization of flying around in private jets leads the public to believe it’s safer than driving on the freeway,” says Amy Fulmer,one of Gleiche’s friends. “The only time they learn otherwise is when it’s too late.”