How to choose the right private jet class

Two numbers decide most of it: how far, and how many. A plain guide to the classes, the range figures that mislead, and the airport nobody asks about.

There is no best private jet, only the right aircraft for a given trip. Two numbers settle most of the question — how far you are flying and how many people are aboard — and a third one, which airport you actually want to land at, decides the rest. Get those three right and the class picks itself.

The range figure is not what you think

Before the classes, the thing that catches people out. Every published range figure, ours included, is the manufacturer’s number at long-range cruise with four passengers aboard. Fill the cabin and add luggage and the real figure drops, sometimes by several hundred kilometres. Add a headwind and it drops again.

So a route sitting at 95 per cent of an aircraft’s book range is not a route that aircraft can fly with a full cabin. This is why we quote the class up rather than sell you a fuel stop you did not plan for — and it is the single most common correction we make to what a client asks for. The figures on each fleet page carry that basis explicitly.

The classes, smallest first

Turboprop — 6 to 9 seats, 2,600–3,350 km, from €2,200/hr

A turboprop like the Pilatus PC-12 or King Air 200 is the cheapest way to move a small group, and it does something no jet in this list can: it lands on short, unpaved and mountain strips. If the point of the trip is to get close to somewhere a jet cannot reach, this is the answer regardless of budget. It is slower — around 530 km/h against 800-plus for a jet — so on anything over about two hours the time cost starts to bite.

Very light jet — 4 to 5 seats, 1,900–2,200 km, from €2,800/hr

The very light jet — Citation Mustang, Phenom 100, CJ1 — is a jet for four people on short sectors. Cannes to Milan, Nice to Geneva, London to Paris. The cabin is genuinely small and the luggage hold is smaller; four people with ski bags do not fit, and that is the mistake most often made with this class.

Light jet — 6 to 8 seats, 2,400–3,000 km, from €3,300/hr

The light jet is where most European charters land: the CJ2 and Hawker 400XP carry six or seven with proper bags across almost any intra-European sector. If you have no unusual requirement, this is the default, and it is the class to price first.

Super-light jet — 7 to 8 seats, 3,400–3,800 km, from €3,500/hr

For a few hundred euros an hour more than a light jet, the super-light jet — Citation XLS+, Phenom 300, PC-24 — buys a materially larger cabin, a real luggage hold and around four hours of range. It covers London to Barcelona or Ibiza with eight aboard. Per seat it is often the best value on the whole list, and it is the class we suggest most often when a client’s first instinct was a light jet for a full cabin.

Between this and the next class sits the midsize category — 4,250 to 5,200 km, seven to nine seats — which fills the gap where a super-light runs out of legs but a super-midsize is more aircraft than the trip needs. Ask us and we will quote it; the pages for those three types are still being photographed.

Super-midsize — 8 to 10 seats, 5,300–7,400 km, from €5,800/hr

The super-midsize — Challenger 350, Legacy 500, Praetor 600 — plus the Citation Sovereign — is the first class with a flat floor and a cabin you can properly stand and move in. Six to nine hours of range puts North Africa, the Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean within one leg of Western Europe. This is the class where a working flight starts to feel like an office rather than a seat.

Heavy jet — 10 to 14 seats, 5,200–7,400 km, from €7,500/hr

A heavy jet — Challenger 605, Falcon 2000LXS, Legacy 650 — trades some of the super-midsize’s efficiency for cabin volume and passenger count. Choose it when the group is genuinely twelve, or when the flight is long enough that a separate seating and sleeping area changes the day. Two outliers are worth knowing. The Falcon 2000LXS lands in far less runway than the rest of the class, which keeps Cannes, Sion and the shorter Greek strips available; and the Challenger 850 is a converted regional airliner, so its cabin runs 14.76 m — nearly twice the length of anything else here.

Ultra-long-range — 13 to 19 seats, 11,000–14,300 km, from €11,000/hr

An ultra-long-range jet — Global 6000 and 7500, Falcon 7X and 8X, G650ER — crosses oceans without stopping. Europe to the west coast of America, to Singapore, to Johannesburg, nonstop. On any sector under about five hours this is simply an expensive way to fly a distance a smaller aircraft covers as comfortably.

VIP airliner — 19 to 50 seats, 8,500–11,500 km, from €18,000/hr

A VIP airliner is an airline aircraft fitted out as a private one: a delegation, a team, a family group of thirty. Worth knowing before you ask for one — its size is its constraint. An airliner needs a stand that exists and is free, it cannot use London City at all, and alpine and island short strips are out.

The third variable: where you actually want to land

Range and headcount are the questions everyone asks. The airport is the one that quietly rules aircraft out. London City needs a 5.5-degree steep approach onto 1,508 m, so the type must be certified for it, the individual airframe must carry the modification and the operator must hold the approval — three conditions, and most aircraft fail at least one. Cannes–Mandelieu takes light jets only. Several alpine and Greek island strips are shorter than a heavy jet’s landing requirement on a wet day.

Which is why the useful way to brief us is by destination rather than by aircraft. Tell us where you want to be standing, and the airport constraint often decides the class before the range figure gets a say.

The three ways people size it wrong

• Too big for the trip. A heavy jet for four people over ninety minutes is the most expensive mistake available, and the most common. Nothing about the flight is better; only the invoice changes.
• Too small for the cabin. Booking to the seat count and forgetting the luggage. Four passengers with winter sports gear need the class above the one the headcount suggests.
• Right aircraft, impossible day. London to Larnaca and back is about nine hours of flying, which breaks the crew duty day before it troubles the aircraft. That is a second crew or a night stop, and both are priced.

How we actually choose

In practice we work backwards: the destination airport rules out what it rules out, the passenger and luggage count sets the floor, the sector length with a full cabin sets the class, and only then does price enter. If two classes both work, we quote both and say which we would take. The arithmetic behind the number is in what it costs to charter a private jet, and if your dates are loose it is worth reading how empty legs work first — the class you end up on is sometimes decided by what happens to be repositioning that week.

Send us the route, the date and the number of passengers — with the bags — and we will name the class we would put you on and why, before we quote it.