A simple question, really. If you had unlimited funds and you wanted to fly from, say, Los Angeles to London, would it be faster to buy a ticket on a commercial airline*, or would chartering a private jet get you there sooner? What kind of top speeds could you achieve with each?
For the purposes of this question, I’m not asking you to factor in time spent at ticket counters or anything like that. I’m looking for a straight comparison between the two methods of flight from takeoff to landing.
From takeoff to landing only, and assuming your private jet has the range, I’d say that there will be little difference in time.
Oops, part 2 of your question:
A Learjet 45 can cruise at, according to my brief google, around 550mph or so, perhaps a touch less. That, I presume, is ground speed. That plane, however, wouldn’t have the range to go from LA to London, but I’m guessing that that detail wasn’t really key to your question.
A Boeing 777 could cruise at 560mph.
These are approximate numbers of course, but the general point is that most civil jets fly at around the same speed.
It would be airspeed, ground speed is not considered in aircraft performance as it is affected by the weather.
Commercial jets and private jets all cruise at similar speeds.
The Canadair Challenger has a high speed cruise of Mach 0.82 (541mph) and a “typical cruise speed” of Mach 0.80 (528mph) @ 37,000’.
A B747 has a typical cruise speed of Mach 0.85 (567mph) at 35,000’.
A B777 has a typical cruise speed of Mach 0.84 at 35,000’.
On the other hand a B737 cruises at Mach 0.785.
So it depends on what aeroplane but they are in the same ballpark.
Edit: it can be difficult to accurately compare speeds as they are often quoted as a fraction of the speed of sound. As the speed of sound varies with temperature and therefore altitude, 0.80M at 25,000’ is not the same as 0.80M at 30,000’.
Also commercial jets rarely cruise at max speed as it is not as economical as a lower speed. The “typical cruise speeds” aren’t maximum speeds but rather speeds you’d be likely to get on a flight with an airline. That’s probably more relevant to your questions anyway.
Further thoughts.
http://www.textron.com/textron_businesses/cessna/cessna_products.jsp
The Cessna Citation X can cruise at Mach 0.92 or 600mph which is faster than any speed you’ll get in an airliner.
Where private jets really score is that they save you a lot of time at each end: because you’re in a private terminal and not stuck with hoi polloi, the security process is much quicker, you’re not waiting around so long, if you’re delayed you don’t miss the plane, your bags come off with you, etc. And there’s the privacy: you’re not stuck in a steel tube with screaming children etc.
I forgot to add there’s also the huge flexibility: you charter your plane to go from A to B directly; with a commercial airline, you might have to go via other places. Plus private jets can operate from smaller runways so you’re not constrained by the major airports and their associated problems.
This is all absolutely true, but the OP seemed to be specifically excluding these issues. On the other hand, they are the main reasons why private jets are better (for those who can afford then) than commercial airliners.
Purely based on the time from takeoff to landing - I’d say it’s a wash (assuming that the planes that you are comparing have the range).
At altitude, most of these planes are not limited in speed by power. They are limited by approaching Mach 1. Somewhere around Mach .7 airflow starts changing. The closer you get to Mach 1, the more weird stuff starts happening.
The planes that I work on have huge amounts of power. That power is used to get off the ground and up to cruising altitude quickly. Once there, the power is reduced significantly to get a cruise speed of 550-600MPH.
Former airline pilot here …
As others have said, the typical bizjet is not materially faster than a typical Boeing-size airliner.
The RJs are generally a bit slower, with typical cruise speeds of Mach .70 to .74. Current Boeing / Airbus narrow-bodies are .74-.78, and the big guys other than 747 do .78 - .82. A 747 wants to go fast, more like .82- .85.
And, as noted above, in general we run at an economical speed, not absolute max cruise speed. The difference is significant, generally .10 to .15 Mach. So the numbers quoted in various non-specialist sources can be hard to compare unless you know what sort of value they’re quoting. My numbers above are day-to-day actual in-use numbers.
Bizjets typically cruise in the .75-.80 bracket, just a bit faster than the average, and Cessna really likes to tout the big dick, er um, I mean high max cruise speed, of the Citation X. The airplane is even designed to look phallic. But it seems to work. CEOs love 'em.
Bizjets are also generally range limited, which means the extra range they get from flying well below their advertised max cruise is often critical to getting where they’re going without a time-wasting fuel stop. As a result, regardless of the advertised numbers, they’re often doing .78 like the rest of us.
An issue they, and we, encounter all the time is there is essentially a one-lane road to each major airport. You can’t go faster than the guy in front of you. There are routes from all over the place converging in towards any major city. As those get closer together, eventually you get one logical line of traffic even if we’re still on separate routes/altitudes.
And once they all get in a line, the slow poke sets the pace.
In theory with different altitudes available you could run at different speeds, at least for the enroute cruise portion of the flight. As a practical matter that doesn’t play out much with modern traffic density. Eventually everybody needs to fit through one spot in the sky with 10-15 miles between them. On crap weather days, the spacing increases to 30 miles, just to meter the flow into the airport down to a rate they can handle.
Imagine passing somebody on the freeway where he’s doing 60, your max speed is 62, and you can’t get back in his lane until you’re 2 miles ahead of him. That takes a lot of distance & time. Multiply eveything by 10 & you get an idea of what we’re dealing with. To pass somebody enroute from LA to NYC you’ve got to start over Illinios & finish over Ohio, because the one-lane off ramps are in central Pennsylvania.
Years ago (like the late 80s), bizjets could fly higher than the typical 727 / MD80 / early 737 and often had better navigation tools. So they could get above the airliners and drive directly to the other end of their route, while the airliners zig-zagged their way from one radio navigation beacon to another. The zigs are small, maybe a 10 degree course change every ~200 miles. But over a long haul that ads up to a few extra minutes.
Now everybody has direct here-to-there navigation with INS + GPS. And the current airliners run high enough that there is only a little space above them for the bizjets “express lane”. So pretty much, they get in line with the rest of us, particularly in the eastern half of the US.
Bottom line: as others have said, 98% of the gain is on the ground, not in the air.
Was reading this article last night. The idea is that, at business class fares, small supersonic jets can be competitive with the big airliners. They’ve also managed to minimize the sonic boom, perhaps allowing Mach > 1 speeds over land.
Going beyond the immediate scope of the OP, the other big advantage of business jets is their ability to get you closer to your final destination by landing at small regional airports.
I used to work for a company that had a share of a business jet (a LearJet of some flavor). If more than 4 or so employees were going to the same location, it was common to use the LearJet. I and four others had to attend a meeting in Plant City, Florida, leaving from the Chicago area. We took the LearJet from Palwaukee Airport in the NW suburbs of the city (and left pretty much whenever the last person showed up) and flew directly to Zephyrhills Municipal Airport, 10 minutes by car from our meeting location. The closest commercial airport is Tampa, and would have required a 45 minute drive to the meeting. When the meeting was over we drove back to the Zephyrhills Airport and walked right on the plane. I think we were airborne within 15 minutes of getting to the airport.
Granted, this was pre-9/11. I have to assume that there is a little more involved from a security standpoint, but a business jet would still save lots of time.
The other advantage was in the ability to adjust our schedule at the last minute. While in Florida, a thunderstorm started heading our way. The pilot called to inform us, we cut the meeting short by a little bit, and scurried out to the airport to get out ahead of the foul weather. If that had been a commercial flight we would have sat at the airport waiting for the storm to blow over (or wound up spending the night).
Thanks for all the responses, folks – very interesting.
Yes, I understood already the practical advantages of being able to take a private jet, although I greatly appreciate the anecdotes you guys have provided along those lines. I just didn’t have any idea of whether the smaller jets could essentially outrun a commercial airliner. Thanks, guys!
I never fully understood this until I got to experience it firsthand. Our group in Alabama was going to a meeting at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. I understand it normally takes a whole day to get there - a 1-stop flight followed by a 3+ hour drive. That means a 1-day meeting becomes a 3-day trip. But because our group was just big enough to fill NASA’s Gulfstream II they let us use it. We went to the local airport at 6am, we were in the air by 6:30, and arrived in Wallops in time for a 9am meeting (and that’s after losing 1 hour in time zone difference). After an all-day meeting we were home by 6pm.
And before you think that’s a waste of taxpayer’s money, keep in mind that if we had flown commercial, NASA would have had to pay for airline tickets, hotel rooms (2 nights) and rental cars for 10 people, not to mention the 2 days of our time (with pay) wasted in travel.
Or not. Another advantage of small aircraft is that the pilot can explain to each passenger why a delay or early departure is required for the safety of the flight. The major airline pilot is going to try to keep schedule until the decision is taken from him by an airport closure. You might hear an airline captain say “We have to wait because the airport is closed for departures due to weather at this time.” You won’t ever hear “I know other aircraft are taking off, but frankly they are being flown by idiots, and I just don’t have the stones to imitate their folly.”
Majors have schedules to keep, and on-time ratings to maintain. It used to be that we lost an airliner every year or three due to vertical wind shear. Denver-Stapleton installed an anemometer network, and now Doppler radar installations are ubiquitous. This is touted as a huge safety advance and rightly so… A low tech solution was available since before the Wright Brothers were in short pants, however: DON’T TAKE OFF OR LAND IN CRAPPY WEATHER. Simply delay takeoff, cancle the flight, or if in the air, divert to the filed alternate airport when there are thunderheads surrounding the airport, or along the intended flight path. It is not like towering black bottomed cu-nims (thunderheads) are hard to see, and the presence of virga is a pretty good clue that they are producing some significant down-wash. Still most of the time you get away with flying under them, so before the technical detection systems arrived, airlines and the FAA played the numbers game with passenger safety to maintain the convienience of air travel.
Of course diversions and delays would have annoyed passengers, and any pilot who diverted when a colleague survived a landing would have been second guessed out of his career by airline management. Private pilots divert to alternate airports due to weather on a regular basis. 9/11/01 aside, Airliners divert so seldom that it usually makes the news when it happens. A lot has to do with the aircraft capabilities of course, but the economic and other pressure on airline pilots moves diversion into the last resort category.
It would have made operation from some airports impractical during the peak thunderstorm season. Totally unacceptable to the PTB, so a way had to be found to still have their cake after they had eaten it.
The FAA and the airlines will fix a problem if it can be achieved by throwing money (preferably tax money) at it, but if it inconveniences passengers, it will only happen if applies to every single flight by every single airline. The pilot of smaller aircraft with little if any management to second guess him can look out for his own hide, and yours, your convenience be damned. And sometimes it can even be more convienient. A group of thunderstoms might close a big airport for and hour or so. At a small airport the pilot can hang out and land in a short window between two storms. This doesn’t work if you have a stack of 10 airliners all trying to do that.
It also depends on you define “private jet”. You can buy an F-18… http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/02/17/jet.fighter.ap/index.html …with a cruising speed of ~1,200mph.
didnt Pepsi get in trouble for making peopel think they could get a harrier through some contest?
Yup.
They won the case though.
Here’s a tale of another advantage: many years ago, a friend of my father’s was being flown from A to B in Africa. He spotted something interesting on the ground and wondered aloud wahat it was. So the pilot, being an ex WW2 fighter pilot, dove the plane down for a better look. 
I suppose we’re getting off topic at this point, but it’s my thread and my questions been answered, so who cares? 
I remember reading about someone else recently (a politician, perhaps?) who owns a couple of fighter jets for his personal use. Assuming that your plane is not armed, of course, does one need to do anything different in terms of filing flight plans and such in order to fly an F-18 from one airport to another within the US? And are civilians limited to being able to fly at certain speeds?