DECEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 121
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“This is the entire aviation-aerospace
continuum,” he says. There are now six
manufacturers of private jets and some
40 different models. About 14,150 private
jets—a small club—are now operating in the
United States and Canada.
Big corporations such as Xerox, GE, and
IBM were the early adopters of private-jet
travel. They realized that it was a produc-
tivity tool, allowing executives to travel
around the country safely and unimped-
ed, visiting plants and facilities not easily
reached by commercial jets. “What was
their collective experience?” Vick says.
“They’d come out of World War II. They’d
seen the utility these airplanes provided
and they were like, ‘Look, we need to get
from point A to point B quickly and effi-
ciently, and now we’re taking trains, planes,
and automobiles to do that. If we had our
own airplane, how would this work?’ And
they liked the answer.” While there may
be more than 400 commercial airports
in the United States, there are more than
5,000 airports that serve private jets. “It’s
a competitive issue,” Vick continues. “As
businesses got large enough, could afford
the operating expense of these assets, had
the requirement to service global supply
chains, and needed their people to be very
productive, very secure, very efficient—
with the demands on their time for a tens-
of-billions-of-dollars enterprise—it’s not
too difficult to understand why the assets
are valued like they are in order to deliver
that kind of productivity.”
The stock market bonanza that started
in 1982 brought with it a new wave of cor-
porate raiders, junk-bond financiers, and
high-profile investment bankers doing
huge M&A deals for ridiculous fees, along
with the emergence of the private-equity
and hedge fund industries. Slowly but
surely, these people were making ungodly
amounts of money and were suddenly
able to afford the luxury of a private jet,
which can cost tens of millions to buy
new and then millions more each year to
operate, between the cost of pilots, flight
attendants, housing, and maintenance.
(Then, of course, there is the cost of the
helicopters needed to get from Manhattan
to airports in such places as Farmingdale,
Long Island, or Teterboro.)Jets also add an element of magic to a
Wall Street banker’s life—as if the money
weren’t enough. During my first week at
Chase Manhattan Bank, where the late
Jimmy Lee recruited me to join the bur-
geoning M&A group he was building, I
was off on one of the bank’s private jets
to Bermuda for a day of golfing with one
of Chase’s best clients, the Boston-based
buyout firm Thomas H. Lee Partners,
which had just bought and sold Snapple,
making a fortune. The Lee guys had flown
down to Bermuda on their own private jet.
We flew on ours. I remember arriving in
Teterboro early for the flight—couldn’t risk
being late, of course—and taking the first
seat that I saw. As it turned out, that was
Lee’s seat, and woe unto the person who
made the mistake of sitting in it.
Another time, still at Chase, I was trying
to sell Airfone, the business owned by Bell
Atlantic that provided exclusive in-flight
phone service on commercial (and private)
jets. It was an interesting moment in time,
before cell phones were ubiquitous and
commercial airlines agreed to allow their
use. Airfone was immensely profitable,
something like 50 percent EBITDA mar-
gins. But the fear, correct in the end, was
that the business would disappear. The
question was how quickly that would hap-
pen. Forstmann and his partners wanted an
early look at trying to buy the company and
agreed to pay full price if they liked it.
Off we went together to Chicago, where
Airfone was based. We took the Forst-
mann Little helicopter from the West
Side heliport to Teterboro, right across
the Newark Airport airspace. Then we
boarded the Forstmann Little Gulfstream
jet with a big “FL” logo on the tail. (This
was before Forstmann got his own jet.) It
was quite the experience: plush leather
seats, anything we wanted to eat and drinkinside a powerful jet that seemed to take
off by going straight up, before reaching a
cruising altitude of something like 45,000
feet. The Airfone deal was a bust, but
the memories of playing gin rummy, for
high cash stakes, with the two late Forst-
mann brothers in that luxurious private jet
linger on and on.
The g-forces a high-end jet can produce
sexualize wealth. Straight up! What a feel-
ing. All that money has been turned into
power you can feel, that you can summon
on a whim. It’s something transcendent.
No wonder it’s the superrich addiction.
“Do you know what a pain in the ass it is
to have one?” the private-equity executive
continues, rhetorically. “You’ve got to have
pilots. You’ve got to have insurance. You’ve
got to have a hangar. You’ve got to have
somebody to deal with it. You’ve got to pay
payroll. And everybody does it. It’s crazy.
It’s like the most important status symbol.
It’s like the folded shirts in The Great Gats-
by. It’s the same idea. Remember when Jay
folds his shirts in the armoire? Same idea.”
Of course, part of the beauty of Gatsby’s
shirts is that they’re Gatsby’s. No one else
has them. No one else can afford them.
Even more so, private jets mark the
superrich as a separate class, insular, at
a remove from everyone else, just like
Wolfe envisioned. Anand Giridharadas,
the best-selling author of Winners Take
All, thinks this phenomenon is a problem,
and not only for the have-nots. “Let me
address this to anybody who has felt the
need to buy an airstrip in New Zealand to
feel safe,” he says. “Let me address them
directly. If you feel the need to buy an air-
strip in New Zealand to feel safe, you may
not be living right. You may not be running
your business right. You may not be pay-
ing your taxes properly. Like if you need
a James Bond–like escape plan from the
potential rage of the public, the thing that
might make you even safer than that air-
strip is asking yourself how you have been
complicit in the public getting so angry and
how you can help reverse it. Just a thought.
Or do it your way.”