How much does it cost to fly private? - Rachel Yang

Across 2023 and 2024, one internationally renowned musician

flew their private jet 396 times in 365 days.

And one of those trips was just six minutes long.

Figures like this aren’t uncommon among the world’s richest jet-setters—

in fact, this frequent flyer probably isn’t even the celebrity

you’re thinking of.

So what's the price tag for this high flying lifestyle?

The majority of private flying happens in the US,

where even a relatively short trip is incredibly expensive.

If you want to fly private, you have two options:

buying a jet or renting one.

Jet rentals can run from roughly $7,500 an hour for domestic flights

to roughly $17,000 an hour for international ones.

For context, that’s over $40,000 to fly from LA to New York,

and over $120,000 to fly from New York to London.

And that's before paying an additional several thousand dollars for the crew,

the fuel, landing fees for the airport, and federal taxes.

That said, these rental costs are still much cheaper

than actually buying a plane.

Depending on their size, new jets run anywhere from $2 to $65 million.

Then, in addition to the usual operational costs for each flight,

jet owners still have to pay for a hangar to park in

and up to $1 million a year for routine inspections and maintenance.

This is already absurdly expensive.

But private flying also has a major environmental cost.

While both private and commercial planes emit a lot of CO2,

commercial planes do so to move a lot of people.

For example, in 2022, commercial airplanes emitted roughly 800 megatons of CO2

moving about 853 million passengers.

That’s a little less than one ton of CO2 per person per flight.

On average, most people emit four tons of CO2 a year—

so taking two round trip flights would double their emissions.

This math already isn’t great, but private jets make it so much worse.

With only a handful of people onboard,

private flights emit 10 to 20 times more emissions per passenger on average.

And since their passengers tend to be frequent flyers,

their individual emissions are astronomical.

In 2023 alone, the top ten US private fliers

produced more combined emissions than 6,500 people.

And for the past few years,

roughly 1% of fliers have been responsible for almost half of aviation emissions.

This discrepancy is huge,

and it will likely continue growing as the private aviation industry expands.

However, while we probably can’t convince celebrities and CEOs

to fly commercial,

one promising approach for reducing plane emissions

is swapping existing jet fuel for Sustainable Aviation Fuels, or SAF.

Traditional jet fuel is made from fossil fuels

and releases carbon into the atmosphere when burned.

SAFs, on the other hand,

are made from waste materials like used cooking oil,

and renewable crops like corn and algae.

These biomaterials still emit carbon when burned,

but growing these crops pulls enough CO2 out of the atmosphere

to offset those emissions by up to 86%.

If the entire jet fuel pipeline shifted to SAFs,

it could reduce aviation emissions by up to 94%.

But for this to happen, SAF producers need to overcome two obstacles.

First, there aren't enough crops to produce biofuels on a large scale.

Researchers are developing synthetic SAFs that don’t require crops,

but they’re still being rolled out.

Second, current SAF production is relatively small scale,

which makes it extremely expensive.

At three times the cost of normal fuel,

most airlines won’t even consider making the switch,

and if they did it would cause airfare to skyrocket.

Governments in Singapore, Japan, and most notably the EU

have already started programs

to support widespread SAF adoption and fund their development.

But this is where private fliers could actually help the environment.

Most jet owners already spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year

on private flights,

and it would only cost them a few thousand more per flight to use synthetic SAFs.

This boom in usage would fund both SAF development and large-scale production.

And those advances would make sustainable fuel cheaper for everyone—

both the people flying private and those privately wishing they were.