Gleaming in the light, it stands inside FLYINGGROUP’s brand-new hangar, one of the private aviation companies based at Antwerp Airport in Deurne. An aluminium-coloured Embraer Legacy 500, added to the FLYINGGROUP fleet only at the end of May. The Brazilian-built twin-engine private jet is perfectly suited to carrying up to nine passengers in complete luxury to destinations as far as 5,500 kilometres away. Price tag: around 25 million US dollars.

“Big? I’d call it a very nice mid-size jet,” says Bernard Van Milders (67), founder and co-CEO of FLYINGGROUP. For something truly large, look instead at the immaculate white, three-engine Dassault Falcon 7X in the adjacent hangar. “That aircraft can fly fourteen passengers non-stop from Antwerp to Los Angeles if necessary. It comes with a flight attendant on board and is incredibly quiet as well. There’s nothing worse than the noise inside one of those large Airbuses.”

Van Milders has been operating private jets from Antwerp Airport for 32 years. Over that period, however, the industry’s business model has changed dramatically. In the early days, private aviation companies themselves co-owned many of the business jets they operated. Today, the aircraft are owned by their clients. Who those clients are, we are not allowed to know. Nor are we permitted to photograph the aircrafts’ registration numbers. In this industry, discretion is everything…

Small translated part of the newspaper article written by Pieter Van Maele in DE STANDAARD on 12 August 2026. Pictures by Ans Brys.

Read the full article in Dutch on the website of DE STANDAARD