Having a Citation V Twin Jet is awesome. It’s also really cool to own a Gulfstream G550 or a Dassault Falcon 7X. But owning a private luxury jet is one thing, maintaining and running one is an entirely different matter. While a relative few people actually own these super expensive aluminum tubes with turbofan engines attached, everyone knows they’re super expensive to operate. How expensive? Operating costs can range from $2,500 to over $10,000 PER HOUR depending on the type of private jet – and that doesn’t include the initial cost of the jet, it’s maintenance or upkeep. Those numbers are scary big.

But believe it or not, private jets are relatively easy to justify if you have the cash (or financing) to buy one, just like almost everything else that falls into the luxury category.

How to justify a private jet

Let’s say your the CEO of a huge company and you make $5 million per year with a $3.5 million annual bonus. That means your time is worth around $4,086 per hour (based on a 40 hour work week). Considering that a Citation V Twin Jet can travel ^[2] 550 kph (that’s knots per hour) and easily traverse half the country in less than 2 or 3 hours, and if you take a few highly paid employees with you to inspect that new plant you opened a couple of states away, the jet saves you the hassle of going through airport security and the time wasted with arriving 90 minutes early. Any jet that can save you more than a few hours is surely worth the price tag ^[3] and the cost of maintenance, right? Right?

No.