When’s the last time you spotted a top executive or A-list celebrity at the airport? Aside from all the other ways that flying commercial has become less pleasant and less glamorous, the surge in private aviation has left it the preserve of the hoi polloi. From under 3,000 in 1994, business jet sales were on a pace to crack 20,000 last year. But now the industry is in a dive. So, if one’s idea of consolation for long queues and inedible meals is rubbing shoulders with that bank or auto executive you saw on TV being abused by Congress, you are in luck. Jets have lately become a symbol of greed and excess, turning what should have been only a bout of turbulence into the perfect storm for jet makers and operators.

Companies such as Citigroup, General Motors, Starbucks and Royal Bank of Scotland are scrambling to unload jets into a saturated market that has seen prices drop an estimated 30 per cent since the summer. Russian oligarchs and hedge fund titans are suddenly selling too. Exacerbating all this is shrivelling demand from a new class of flyer below the super-rich. Fractional ownership had allowed the swelling ranks of the merely wealthy to live like billionaires. It also turned NetJets, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, into the largest private aviation group in the world with 813 planes. If it were a commercial airline, this would give it one of the largest fleets plying the skies.