September 2008 is not considered a good month to have launched anything, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers sent the world’s financial markets into a tailspin. Least of all financing a new business jet company with the biggest single European order ever.

But Jonathan Breeze, chief executive of Jet Republic, was undaunted. His private aviation company announced that it had secured funding of $1.5bn and had ordered a fleet of 110 Bombardier jets. “I can’t say it was easy, but it didn’t seem difficult. It was one in a logical series of progressions in what we’d been working on,” he says. “There is finance for those who are in a good position.”