My Other Vehicle is a Gulfstream

[Jcrowley]

WHETHER the joys of summer are riper for plutocrats than for the rest of us is always open to question. Would watermelon taste sweeter if you had a billion in the bank? Let me spit out this seed, check my bank balance and get back to you. As vacation season reaches its peak this month and millions of Americans jam the highways and skies seeking a precious portion of leisure, there is at least one way in which it becomes clear that the very rich are indeed very different from the rest of us.

That difference can be described in two simple words, almost magical to those who partake: flying private.

Just two decades ago, private aviation was exclusively the province of a global super- elite. That was before airline deregulation and 9/11 turned commercial air travel into the noisy, cramped, humiliating nightmare it is today. It was before the tech boom and hedge funds threw off bumper crops of multimillionaires. It was before innovations in the private aviation industry made it possible, first, for the ultrawealthy to use the time-share model known as fractional share ownership to enter the big leagues of private jet travel and, more recently, for the merely rich to buy into jet-sharing plans that are the deep-pocketed equivalents of a MetroCard.

“When I was young it was quite rare,” said a society decorator in his early 50’s. “Maybe you knew one older gentleman with a great deal of money who had his own jet.”

Nowadays, private air travel has become so mainstream, relatively, that among the decorator’s numerous young and well-heeled clients is a couple in their 30’s whose Cessna Citation X encountered instrument problems in this mountain resort town not long ago, forcing the couple and their sons to board an airborne cattle-car to Denver. There, the clients’ children, 4 and 6 — never having experienced a commercial airport — sat on the floor of the vast and bewildering concourse and wailed. And who among us, truly, has not at some point experienced a similar urge?

“Seven years ago, I was traveling a lot and I just got sick of the hassles,” said Gavin Polone, a former Hollywood agent and now a producer whose credits include the cable television show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “My Super Ex-Girlfriend.”

http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/fashion/06jets.html