I'm a private jet broker who arranges $500,000 honeymoon flights and $60,000 pet rescues

• Dan Cook is the director of sales at Victor, a private jet charter company.
• He's arranged flights like a $500,000 honeymoon tour, and "secret weekends" for a group of friends.
• But some charter jets for health reasons, and Victor is trying to help decarbonize the industry.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dan Cook, sales director at Victor. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

My dad has a pilot's license, so ever since I was a kid I've been around planes and helicopters. It seemed like an exciting industry.

Private jets are obviously a sexy product. I was young and hungry and wanted to join a company that seemed to be doing exciting things.

I'm a musician at heart so I came to London to do music. At the end of my university course I was lucky enough to get myself a record deal. Unfortunately, it didn't work out.

In my early 20s, I was just working in a shoe shop seven days a week, basically to just stay in London. And then I managed to get a job at a startup through friends, going door to door in central London restaurants trying to flog an app.

And through somebody that I met along that journey, they advertised an opening at Victor. 

The prospect of dealing with some of the most influential and successful people in the world took my fancy. I reached out to my friend, and she kind of helped put my resumé on the top of the pile.

I started at the very bottom of the sales team. Over the years, I found my groove and eventually became the top salesperson.

I wasn't the manager or the director, but I was the leader in the troops. There came a point where our sales director had left, and they asked me if I wanted to take the position.

One client paid nearly $60,000 to rescue five dogs and cats

You have a flier that wants to arrange the flight and you have an aircraft management company that manages the jet. And our job is to find the customer, the best-suited aircraft and service provider based on what they've given us as their requirements.

The majority of the people we deal with are ultra-high-net-worth individuals. They tend to be cash-rich, time-poor. So they want things done well, and they want them done well fast. 

There are certain things that have to happen in more formal channels like bookings, but you'd be surprised at how many people these days are happy to just do all of the communication over WhatsApp.

Jet charter with Victor starts at about $6,000 for an hour's flying. A trip from London to New York would set you back about $100,000. 

Extensive schedules which include multiple destinations tend to rack up the largest bills. A recent music tour we serviced cost over $3 million for 16 flights across one continent. 

We've had a member of a royal family pay more than $500,000 for their honeymoon – traveling from the Middle East, into Europe, over to the US, back through Europe, and then home.

There was a client who was rescuing something like five dogs and cats from Riyadh and wanted to bring them back to the UK. They paid nearly $60,000.

There was a client I used to help arrange "secret weekends." He'd book an aircraft for him and his friends, who wouldn't know where they were going until they boarded.

So we had to call ahead to the gate and let them know their names so they didn't ask them where they were going. Once they got on board, there was a big announcement we'd arrange with the crew, and they would go off and have some fun.

'We're not pretending this is a normal thing'

Confidentiality is a massive part of what we do. I think a lot of people think about private jets as just pure luxury, when actually it's not the case. 

You have people who are flying with close protection officers, for example, members of royal families and government officials required to have security with them at all times.

There's a genuine risk on their life if they're out in public spaces. And they use private aviation for the assurance that they have minimal risk throughout their journey.

In some cases, like a medical emergency, the private jet could be the difference between that person living or dying.

An interesting one that I dealt with was helping a man who had an illness that seriously compromised his immune system. They chose to start flying private during the pandemic, because catching COVID was a serious risk.

He was exploring booking the whole first class cabin on a commercial airliner for his family, in the region of $200,000. The jet was about $235,000, so he chose that.

Flying private is a serious luxury. We're not pretending that it's this normal thing that we just deal with.

We say that our clients have a responsibility to address the negative impacts when they're using that luxury.

We've stopped carbon offsetting and moved onto the most credible and most impactful way to reduce CO2 emissions, which is sustainable aviation fuel made from waste products like used cooking oil. We're seeing one in five of our customers replacing fossil fuel with it.

There are clients replacing 100% of the fossil fuel with sustainable fuel. It's not cheap, so they're paying thousands of dollars extra. We need to decarbonize the aviation sector, and sustainable air fuel is the most credible way to do this.