Charter Flights are the Secret Transportation of the Rich and Powerful
By: Chris Stokel-Walker
Tags: Airplanes, Travel, Culture, Power, Wealthy

Around the world, air traffic has nearly ground to a halt. Commercial planes sit lined up on the tarmac, grounded by canceled routes and closed borders. The airline industry is forecasting slow business for the coming year, and some companies may not survive the downturn at all.

But some planes are still flying, and they are carrying precious cargo: For the past few months, charter planes have been shipping people and possessions to where they’re needed most. Charter planes provide a shadow world of transportation, moving essential cargo like personal protective equipment and medical staff, alongside less-than-essential cargo for the mega-rich. When a global pandemic shuts down much of society, you begin to realize what’s important to people by the kind of things they try to move around the world.

Justin Lancaster, chief commercial officer at Air Charter Service, a charter airline broker that normally arranges 23,000 flights per year, began to see business pick up in early March, as the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. Lancaster fielded panicked calls as countries began locking down their borders. Italy, then the worst-hit country before being overtaken by the United States in April, closed its borders entirely on March 9, setting off a chain reaction at airports worldwide. “People were trying to get back to where they needed to be for lockdown,” Lancaster said.

Frantic requests were coming in for private jets — which seat fewer than 19 people — as well as berths on commercial planes. Governments needed huge numbers of repatriation flights to airlift citizens out of locked-down countries. In a single week in late April, repatriation flights returned Britons from Peru, Americans from Switzerland, Greeks from Germany, Russians from Italy, and UAE nationals from India. In March alone, Germany repatriated 42,000 of its citizens on 60 flights. Individuals often had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a seat on one of these planes. (One couple profiled in the New York Times for being stranded on their honeymoon in the Maldives balked at spending $100,000 on a charter flight home to South Africa.) Charter flights also allow private companies to get workers out of sticky situations: Air Charter Service has arranged transport home for South Americans working at a mine in Africa and cruise ship passengers escaping lockdown in the Caribbean.

The challenge Lancaster and his staff encountered during those early days wasn’t necessarily finding space on flights, which was plentiful, or getting flights out of airports that were still open, but figuring out how to navigate the sometimes confusing intricacies of worldwide travel restrictions. Some countries, like the United Kingdom, continued to have open borders; others, like Italy, had firmly locked them down. Australia wouldn’t let passengers layover in the country, and France only allowed its own citizens to return home.

When a global pandemic shuts down much of society, you begin to realize what’s important to people by the kind of things they try to move around the world.

After Donald Trump closed the U.S. border to European nationals on March 11, the reality of lockdown truly sunk in, and the passenger airlines scrapped their normal schedules. Today, two in every three planes worldwide are currently grounded, according to consultants Ascend by Cirium. Across Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, almost all flights remain on the ground. Journeys across Asia-Pacific and North America have continued, buoyed by domestic travel, albeit at a much lower level than before Covid-19 struck.

By now, most people have returned to where they need to be, and the overwhelming majority of people aren’t traveling for business or pleasure anymore. (Unless you’re an essential worker, like the 150 Romanian vegetable pickers who were flown to the U.K. on a $50,000 charter flight in April.)

But you can still attempt to travel — if you can afford it. A private jet chartered by a Croatian businessman with 10 people on board, the men in their forties and fifties and all the women in their early twenties, was turned back to London from France’s Côte d’Azur after landing there in early April. (France, along with the greater European Union, has restricted nonessential travel.) All but one of the passengers returned to the U.K., according to French TV, with the tenth instead taking another charter flight to Berlin, Germany — according to Lancaster, chartering this aircraft would have cost around $11,000.