Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee!
For the cost of a million dollars on the American market, a number of the exceptionally well off had purchased private airplanes in the 1920s –almost immediately after the First World War. It wasn’t up until the 1960s though, the decade that saw Cassius Clay officially become The World’s Greatest, that the purchase of private jets presented the world’s elite with another way to display their oligarchical status. It was in this era that the super-rich realised the vision of private jet ownership and, it later became the decade that the Concord would first take to the air (though the bird wasn’t officially commissioned until 1976). So as the world’s upper-classes were being chauffeured around the skies, with altitude and spending both hitting the ceiling, the middle-classes watched above as these supersonic boardrooms and palaces became the new, lasting symbol of a world-class status for the luxurious and the great.
Unwittingly, it was by combining their limitless buying power with the innovations of Britain’s Rolls Royce, who, from the infant years of jet-systems, had worked with genius Sir Frank Whittle, that these high-flying businessmen and woman acted as the catalyst to the rapid changes in the airline industry. Their investment and popularisation of private jets eventually saw a new economic viability in the purchase (and now hire) of elite transport. This expanding business and social enterprise has since withstood the tests of time, the uncertainties of economic storms and the venom of the critics –having attracted a few along the way (as with every new venture worth embarking on).
Now though, the passengers of private jets, hired and owned, are soaring through the world of legacy, above these rainy clouds with only plain skies ahead. Teaching the world a lesson in grace, might and speed, these world heavyweights proved to Cassius that he wasn’t the only one floating like a butterfly, and, to those that live outside this realm of luxury? Well, put simply, these privileged flyers, having now acquired their desired comfort, privacy and security after a lifetime of graft, have stated the case for one and all that some bees don’t weaken and die after having demonstrated their stinging power.