“We see more green juice on board than champagne”: The new jet set are flying private differently

In May of 1927, Charles Lindbergh – 25 years old, sleep-deprived, and half-frozen – descended through the Parisian night sky in his custom-built, single-engine, high-wing aircraft ‘The Spirit of St. Louis’. Having set off from a muddy, rain-soaked runway on Long Island, he had flown for 33.5 hours alone, navigating storm clouds, turbulence, fog, and bouts of hallucination to complete the first ever non-stop transatlantic flight. On arrival, Lindbergh circled the Eiffel Tower before landing at Le Bourget airfield, where 150,000 people were waiting. Attendees surged toward him, ripped open the cockpit, and carried him across the tarmac on their shoulders, a celebration that ended with trophy hunters tearing the aircraft apart.

Related: 7 remote restaurants in the Nordics worth the trip

Lindbergh was half-Swedish; his father hailed from Smedstorp in Skåne, a fact often buried beneath his legend. But in many ways, that detail is uncannily relevant now. Private aviation’s latest chapter, like its earliest, has a profound connection to Sweden and the Nordics’ particular relationship with flight: pragmatic, efficient and discreetly ambitious. That may explain why, nearly a century after Lindbergh’s history-making flight, our region has become a nucleus for new-era air travel. The Nordics are among Europe’s most resilient economies, Sweden being a hub of private wealth boasting more than 520 centi-millionaires and over one trillion US dollars in assets under management, according to Knight Frank and Henley & Partners report in 2024. Private aviation usage reflects this: aviation industry data platform WingX ranks Sweden eighth in Europe for private jet flights in the first half of 2025.

But where Lindbergh navigated by dead reckoning (he rejected radio navigation gear as heavy and unreliable), today’s elite travellers are in search of something equally elusive: taste and time. “You can’t buy more hours in the day, but you can spend them better,” says Mats Leander, president of the Nordics and Eastern Europe at VistaJet, a subscription-based private aviation company. “Private aviation is the best efficiency tool to give people their time back,” he continues.

For Brian Kelly, founder of website The Points Guy and a travel cultural analyst, the shift in values is palpable. “People still want premium,” he says. “But the markers have changed. Privacy, personalisation, and time, they’re the real luxuries now.” Kelly points to a broader segmentation across travel: “Even in business class, it’s no longer one-size-fits-all,” he says. “In Lufthansa’s new Allegris Business Class, there are over five seating options. British Airways now charges to choose a seat, even if you paid for a Business Class ticket. So, segmentation is the biggest thing I see happening.” With private flight being perhaps the ultimate segment in the market, it seems that, as commercial prices climb, private aviation is starting to make sense for more people – especially for those who can’t afford delays. “Private travel is all about convenience and saving time since airports are as packed as ever, with a record number of travellers going through while airports have, generally, not gotten bigger,” adds Kelly.

Private aviation wasn’t always synonymous with history-making feats or on-the-clock optimisation. During the golden age of ‘Come Fly With Me’, Frank Sinatra lugged his Rat Pack around in a dual-prop plane he dubbed ‘El Dago’, which came complete with a full bar and a piano and helped codify the myth of flying private as something raucous, romantic, and deeply male. Elvis and Priscilla borrowed that same plane to go get married in Las Vegas. The Beatles flew it. The ‘Jet Set’, a term coined by The New York Times in 1951, became shorthand for a glamorous world where proximity to a cocktail cart was as important as your passport stamp count.

By the early 2000s, the Bling Ring era of aviation saw the likes of Paris Hilton clutching her Chihuahua boarding Gulfstreams. It was a champagne-laced level of hyper luxury that was synonymous with diamanté velour track suits, Motorola Razr phones, and staged paparazzi tarmac walks with silver monogrammed Rimowa suitcases. It was the sort of Y2K pop princess look of Juicy Couture revivalism now championed by Zara Larsson. But that is not the VistaJet client of today. Theirs is a low-profile traveller, more akin to Alexander Skarsgård’s Succession character Lukas Matsson than a member of the Entourage set. “Our clients aren’t looking to show off,” says Leander. “In fact, today, we see more green juice on board than champagne.”

Founded in 2004 by Swiss entrepreneur Thomas Flohr, VistaJet recognised the shift to that excess and rejected the traditional ownership and charter models in favour of a sleek, subscription-based service. Effectively, this brought the on-demand logic of Spotify and Netflix to the skies. Travellers don’t own a plane (no depreciating asset on the books) and wherever they are in the world, they have access to an identical fleet – in VistaJet’s case, a global fleet of more than 350 aircraft guaranteed to be ready for take-off within 24 hours.

Related: In the Kitchen with Oliver Ingrosso

Still, the question of emissions can’t be ignored. Aviation accounts for around two and a half per cent of global CO₂ emissions, and private jets, for all their glamour, are famously inefficient. VistaJet doesn’t pretend otherwise. What they do instead is measure obsessively, report transparently, and invest aggressively. In 2025 alone, the company purchased over 27 million litres of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), the equivalent of 11 Olympic swimming pools and 10 flights to the moon, for example. But why, in our digital age, do we feel the need to travel for business at all? “Business travel is back, it just looks different than before,” says Kelly. “It’s changed in that people travel on a less frequent basis but companies have more off-sites and in-person bonding.”

In the Nordics, Leander and his peers see two typical types of private jet travellers: “It’s multinationals and entrepreneurs,” he says. “People who need to be in Munich one day, back in Oslo for a shareholder meeting the next, and closing an infrastructure deal in Singapore two days later.” These are not the people who Instagram their in-flight meals. They’re business leaders who need flexibility, with zero risk of cancellation, delays or missed flights. And, most importantly, privacy. Hedge fund and analysts use private jet flight tracking data to gain an edge by predicting upcoming M&A deals before they are publicly announced (a fitting Succession plot line, if we’ve ever heard one). One of the main perks of travelling private through a subscription model rather than owning your own (or a fraction of a) PJ is the fact that you remain, well, private. Entirely untraceable on flight scanners. VistaJet and its fleet facilitate just that.

And what a fleet it is: feather down duvets, Egyptian cotton bed linen, cashmere blankets, tableware by French heritage brand Christofle on every flight; Moncler-designed crew uniforms and a specially made Le Labo scent diffusing through the cabin. There are in-air sleep programmes, in-flight facial treatments developed with Dr Barbara Sturm, and crew trained in child psychology (and as sommeliers, though hopefully not in the same session). On certain flights, the cabin can be pre-heated to accommodate exotic pets. One memorable passenger list included two elderly Great Danes, a cat, and a Sulcata tortoise, with the floor warmed to mimic the latter’s natural desert habitat.

It all sounds absurd until you realise that, like Lindbergh, these travellers are still crossing oceans with a very precise purpose. Unlike Lindbergh, they’re doing it in comfort, without frostbite or a pocket compass. And waiting for these modern travellers upon arrival are not the parades or paparazzi of yore, but performance metrics and boardrooms. Still, some things haven’t changed. When Lindbergh looked down at the earth from above the Atlantic, he described the view as “too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see”. That’s something no class of cabin can commodify. The view from 40,000 feet still has the power to humble you, whether you’re sipping green juice or champagne.