Unless you happen to have €9,500 to spend per hour of flying, the chances are you have not heard of VistaJet. But the private aviation group, which ferries top executives around the globe – to mines in Angola or meetings in Moscow – is among the fastest growing airlines in the world.

除非你每小时要在飞行上花费9500欧元，否则你可能没听说过VistaJet公司。不过这家私人航空集团却是却是世界上增长最快的航空公司之一。该航空公司负责在全球各地运送企业高管，把他们送往安哥拉的矿山，或送往莫斯科参加会议。

Last year, the Swiss airline’s revenues grew 27 per cent, and its 41 jets took 27,000 passengers on 11,000 flights to 137 countries. It also completed a deal with a local US carrier that will give it full access to the US market for the first time, establishing a foothold in the world’s largest private jet market.

去年，这家瑞士航空公司的营收增长了27%，2.7万名旅客曾乘坐该公司41架客机提供的1.1万次航班飞往137个国家。该公司还与美国当地一家客运航空公司达成一项协议，从而将首次获得进入整个美国市场的权利，在这个世界最大私人客机市场打下了一个落脚点。

That is quite a transformation for a company that began life barely a decade ago comprising one private jet owned by Thomas Flohr. “It all sounds so good today,” he says. “But I never thought it would happen.”

托马斯•弗洛尔(Thomas Flohr)旗下的这家公司十年前才刚刚成立，当时公司靠的是他本人的一架私人客机。对这样的公司来说，以上表现绝对可称为飞跃式发展。对此，弗洛尔说：“如今这一切听上去如此完美。不过我从来没想到它真的会发生。”

Having made his first fortune in asset finance in the 1990s and early 2000s, Mr Flohr – a Swiss entrepreneur with a passion for art and, in his youth, racing cars – was no stranger to using business jets. Indeed, his role in asset finance re­quired so much travel that on some days he could “be somewhere in the morning, and maybe have lunch in another city, and dinner with a client in a third city”.

上世纪90年代和本世纪初，弗洛尔通过资产融资赚得了第一桶金。这位酷爱艺术、年轻时曾着迷于赛车的瑞士企业家对乘坐商用客机并不陌生。事实上，出于资产融资的工作要求，他必须常年在外旅行，以至于有时他会“在某地度过早晨，在另一个城市享用午餐，再与客户在第三个城市共进晚餐”。

But Mr Flohr was not a happy passenger.

不过弗洛尔的飞行体验却算不上快乐。

At that time, there were two main ways to get the use of a private jet without owning it outright: fractional ownership, which buys the right to a certain amount of use of a jet per year; or chartering, where customers negotiate the use of an aircraft flight by flight, usually through a broker.

当时，使用一架私人客机而不全权拥有它有两种主要方式：第一种方式是部分所有权，即购买每年使用一架客机一定次数的使用权；另外一种则是租赁方式，在这种方式下，客户通常会通过经纪人一个一个航班地商定客机使用价格。

Neither satisfied Mr Flohr. The fractional model was “way too complicated”, he says.

两种方式都无法令弗洛尔满意。他说，部分所有权方式“太过复杂”。

Wearing jeans and smart dark jacket, he is speaking in a meeting room at Zurich airport, where he has paused en route from London to Malta, the home of VistaJet’s back office operations.

就在说这番话的时候，弗洛尔正身着牛仔裤和讲究的深色上衣，站在苏黎世机场的一间会议室中。他在由伦敦赶赴马耳他途中在这里稍做停留，马耳他是VistaJet后台运营部门的所在地。

“I negotiated with the fractional guys, but they couldn’t answer the question ‘who do I sell the share to at the end? Say I have it for three years, five years?’” he says, his background in asset finance very much in evidence. “They said ‘well you can sell it back to us’. But I wanted to know who else I can sell to. Because if I can only sell back to them, they dictate the price. And if I don’t know my depreciation until year five is over, I might find myself looking into a black hole.”

他说：“我和出售部分所有权的人们进行过磋商，然而他们回答不了一个问题：‘我的股份最后该卖给谁？比如在我用了三年或五年之后？’他们对此的回答是：‘嗯，您可以再把股份卖给我们。’不过我想知道，除了他们之外，我还可以卖给什么人。因为如果我只能把我的股份卖给他们，价格将由他们决定。另外，如果一直到五年的使用期结束，我才能知道折旧率是多少，那没准我会发现我的财务中出现了一个黑洞。”在这番言谈中，弗洛尔在资产融资方面的背景展露无遗。

Chartering avoided this problem, but brought others. The aeroplanes typically belong to wealthy individuals or companies who make the aircraft available when they do not need them. But the owners can pull them from the charter market at short not­ice, meaning the customer often has no idea what aeroplane they have chartered until they see it on the tarmac.

租赁能避免这个问题，却带来了其他问题。租赁飞机的所有者通常是那些不用飞机时将飞机出租的富人或企业。然而，这些所有者可能会在短暂的知会期之后就退出租赁。也就是说，在看见停放在机场柏油跑道的飞机之前，客户往往对他们所租赁的飞机一无所知。

“Eventually it gets annoying bec­ause you’re spending all this money and you don’t really know what you’re going to get,” says Mr Flohr.

弗洛尔说：“归根结底，这个问题很烦人是因为你花了钱却无法真正了解你将得到什么。”

So he bought a second-hand Learjet 60, adorned it with a natty red stripe, and when he was not using it made it available for charter. Within three months it was making money, but its itinerary rarely overlapped with Mr Flohr’s. “If the plane ended up in Beirut it was crazy for the plane to fly back empty to Zurich, just to fly me to London.”

于是，他购买了一架二手里尔60(Learjet 60)，饰以整齐的红色条纹，不用飞机时就把它用于出租。不到三个月，这架飞机就开始盈利了，然而该飞机的日程很少能与弗洛尔的日程重合。“如果飞机停在贝鲁特，仅仅为了带我去伦敦，就让它空着飞回苏黎世，这么做太疯狂了。”

In part to reduce this mismatch, he bought a second aircraft. When this also made money, he knew he was on to something, and got the financial analysts at his asset finance business to investigate the industry.

部分是出于减少这种日程不匹配的考虑，他购买了第二架飞机。当这架飞机也开始盈利时，他意识到他要开启某种事业了。于是，他动用了旗下资产融资企业中的金融分析师，对这一行业展开调查。

“When the results came back that there was no global consistent brand in this industry that sells to the most successful captains of industry, leaders of countries and so on – it was then that the pieces came together in my head and I went out and bought new three planes,” he says.

他说：“调查结果表明，在这个行业中，不存在那种面向最成功业界领袖、国家领导人等人士的全球统一品牌。当这个结果摆到我面前时，我头脑中的想法开始趋于完整，我立刻着手买了三架新飞机。”

Mr Flohr’s idea was to sell to these captains of industry a new and very simple product: for a guaranteed fee – typically €9,500 per hour on a Challenger 605, and €13,500 per hour on a Global Express, two of Bombardier’s most swish business jets – VistaJet would fly them pretty much anywhere it was safe to go.

弗洛尔的想法是，向那些业界领袖出售一种非常简单的新产品。这个产品就是：只要支付一定的担保费，VistaJet就能将他们运送至任何该公司能安全抵达的地方。以庞巴迪(Bombardier)最豪华的两款商用飞机为例，挑战者605(Challenger 605)每小时的担保费通常是9500欧元，而全球快车(Global Express)每小时的担保费则通常是1.35万欧元。

Clients would not have to take on the asset risk of buying a share in an aircraft, and they would pay only for the time spent in the air. They would also have some of the comforts a weary chief executive might wish for: catering from Nobu, the latest films available to download via an iPad app, and twice as much oxygen as in the cabin of a commercial jet.

客户不必为购买飞机的股份背上资产风险，他们只需要按飞机的飞行时间付费。另外，他们还能享受到疲惫的首席执行官可能希望得到的某些舒适服务，其中包括：Nobu提供的餐饮、通过iPad应用下载最新电影以及比普通商用客机机舱高一倍的含氧量。

Mr Flohr’s timing was propitious at first. VistaJet’s start coincided with the rap­id expansion in trade between emerging economies. The explosion in links bet­ween destinations often ill-served by traditional carriers sent demand for corporate jets soaring.

弗洛尔创业的时机起初非常有利。VistaJet的成立恰逢新兴经济体间的贸易迅速扩张的时期。各目的地间的往来出现了爆炸式发展，而传统客运公司对这类目的地的服务往往非常糟糕，这极大推升了对商用客机的需求量。

Then the financial crisis changed everything. Bookings evaporated, and the asset value of aircraft plummeted as companies offloaded un­wanted jets. To top it all, private jets became a symbol of unthinking corporate ex­cess, thanks in no small part to the ill-judged decision of several car ind­ustry chiefs to fly in their private jets to Washington to discuss a government bailout.

随之而来的金融危机却改变了一切。客户订单迅速减少，飞机的资产价值也随着各企业出售不需要的客机而迅速跌落。更有甚者，私人飞机成了企业盲目铺张的一种象征。这在很大程度上要归功于几位汽车业高管，他们错误地决定乘坐私人飞机赶赴华盛顿讨论政府纾困计划。

For Mr Flohr, who had placed a $1.2bn order with Bombardier for new jets, the timing could not have been worse. Several nail-biting months followed, during which he cut prices and even deferred delivery of some of the new aircraft.

当时，弗洛尔已与庞巴迪签署了12亿美元订单购买新飞机。对他来说，没有比这更不凑巧的了。在随后几个月的焦急等待中，他不得不压低价格，甚至推迟了部分新飞机的交货时间。

Yet Mr Flohr’s manner remains sanguine as he recalls that his ap­proach worked. VistaJet emerged just about in the black from a year that might have killed off an­oth­er young airline. By 2012, it was able to place one of the largest orders ever in private aviation when it signed a $7.8bn agreement with Bombardier for 56 aircraft, and options on a further 86.

不过，回想起这一切，弗洛尔依然保持乐观，他还记得他的措施起了作用。在这个原本能令其他年轻航空公司一败涂地的一年，VistaJet勉勉强强保持了盈利。等到2012年，该公司甚至能与庞巴迪达成一份78亿美元的协议，购买56架飞机，并获得另外86架飞机的购买期权，这是私人航空业有史以来最大的订单之一。

Mr Flohr, who is chairman and sole owner of VistaJet, declines to give precise details of the company’s performance during those years. But he insists it has been “profitable from year one” and adds that since 2010 revenues have grown at an annual rate of between 20 and 25 per cent.

作为VistaJet董事长和唯一所有者，弗洛尔拒绝透露该公司那些年业绩的具体细节。不过他坚称VistaJet“从第一年起就保持盈利”。并补充说，自2010年开始，该公司营收的年增长率在20%到25%之间。

The next targets are the US – a market dominated by NetJets, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway – and China. Vista­Jet’s recent deal with Jet Aviation giving it full access to the US market, says Mr Flohr, was “the big piece of the puzzle missing in my global network”.

VistaJet今后的目标包括美国和中国。目前，美国市场占统治地位的是NetJets公司，该公司归沃伦•巴菲特(Warren Buffett)旗下伯克希尔哈撒韦公司(Berkshire Hathaway)所有。弗洛尔表示，VistaJet最近与Jet Aviation达成的协议令其得以进入整个美国市场，这是“我的全球网络中缺失的一大块拼图”。

A licence to operate within China, he hopes, will follow this year, meaning that after just 10 years VistaJet will cover most of the world’s economic activity. As trade between emerging economies continues to rise, it is this reach that Mr Flohr believes will keep VistaJet expanding as well.

他希望今年能获得在中国的运营牌照，这意味着VistaJet将只用10年就进入了世界经济活动的大部分地区。弗洛尔相信，随着新兴经济体间的贸易持续升温，这一迅猛扩张将推动VistaJet，使之同样保持扩张态势。

“It’s the global presence that gets us the business. We fly people from Marseille to Manchester, but that isn’t our core business. It’s flying them from Moscow to Bogotá,” he says. “I didn’t know this market existed. But I think I was in the right place at the right time. I saw the trend early.”

他说：“正是我们在全球的存在为我们带来了业务。我们也会将人们从马赛送到曼彻斯特，但这并不是我们的核心业务。我们的核心业务是把他们从莫斯科运往波哥大。我过去并不知道存在这样的市场。不过，我想我赶上了天时地利。我很早看到了这个潮流。”

‘If the plane ended up in Beirut, it was crazy for the plane to fly back empty to Zurich, just to fly me to London’