Flying Private With Small Children: Chaos, Contained
Nobody books their first family charter for the champagne. They book it because they’ve done Gatwick at 5am with a two-year-old, and something inside them broke.
Families are the client group that surprises people most — and one of the fastest-growing on our books. Not because flying children privately is glamorous (it emphatically is not; there will still be raisins ground into things), but because almost everything that makes airline travel hellish with small kids is an airport problem, and private aviation deletes the airport.
The arithmetic of small-child travel
Count the failure points on a commercial family trip: the 4:45am wake-up for the timed bag drop. The security queue where the pram gets dismantled while a stranger’s tray hits your toddler in the ear. The gate that’s a 20-minute walk with a child who has decided walking is over. The boarding scrum. The seat that reclines onto your baby-change operation. The carousel wait while everyone melts down in stereo.
Now the charter version: you drive to Biggin Hill or Farnborough at a time you chose — say, 9:30am, after breakfast, aligned with the morning nap. You park next to the terminal or get dropped at the door. Security is a friendly minute in a quiet room. Fifteen minutes after arriving you’re on board, the pram loaded by someone else, and the flight leaves when your family is on it — which matters, because toddlers treat published departure times as advisory.
None of the flying gets easier. Everything around the flying disappears. That’s the product.
The practical stuff parents actually ask
Car seats: yes, and please do. Children under two can legally be lap-held on charter flights as on airlines, but a familiar car seat strapped into a forward-facing jet seat is safer and — the operational point — dramatically increases the odds of a nap. Tell your broker the seat model; the crew will have it fitted before you board.
Bassinets: there’s no airline-style bulkhead cot, but on anything midsize and up the divan (sofa) does the job better — flat, padded, and next to you. On light jets, the car seat is the answer.
The kit: prams, travel cots, sterilisers, the scooter, the balance bike, the entire portable civilisation a small child requires — it all goes in the hold, no fees and no drama. Bring the pram to the aircraft steps; it’ll be handed back at the steps on arrival.
Food: operators will cater anything from warmed bottles to fish fingers if asked, but every parent we know packs the usual snack bag anyway. Familiar beats fancy at 39,000 feet, same as at sea level. The galley can warm milk on most cabin sizes.
Babies’ ears: same physics as commercial — feed or offer something to suck on descent. One genuine advantage: you can ask the crew for a gentler cabin profile, and on short sectors many will happily oblige.
Paperwork: children need their own passports, same as airline travel. One extra wrinkle worth knowing: if a child travels with one parent (different surname) or with grandparents, some countries — Portugal is the classic — want a consent letter from the absent parent(s). Your broker will flag it, but it’s an easy one to sort a week ahead rather than at the FBO.
Which aircraft, for a family
The instinct is “smallest and cheapest, they’re tiny people.” Half right. For anything under about 90 minutes, a light jet or even a turboprop is fine — small children are strapped down for a decent chunk of it anyway.
For the two-and-a-half-hour run south — the London to Palma and London to Nice family staples — one size up earns its money. A midsize cabin like a Citation Excel means a child can lie flat and sleep, a parent can stand upright while jiggling a baby (do not underestimate this), and there’s an enclosed loo, which with a potty-training passenger is not a luxury feature.
The bit that converts people
Every family has a version of the same story after the first trip, and it’s never about the leather. It’s that the two adults arrived at the villa not needing a holiday from the journey. The flight becomes a fifth of the door-to-door time instead of a day-long endurance event, the children treat the little jet as an adventure rather than an ordeal, and — a detail parents mention constantly — nobody spent two hours silently apologising to strangers.
If you’re pricing one up: families travel in exactly the party sizes where charter maths starts working. Two families sharing a midsize to the Med is one of the most common bookings we do, and per head it’s a lot closer to peak-season business class than anyone expects. Raisins in the carpet included, no extra charge.