I'm surprised that I haven't heard of small jets (fighters/jet trainers) being used for commercial courier services (although there are instances of military jets transporting organs for transplant, https://apnews.com/article/c1309c58720c78347c1ebbbade56d35d).

They can be privately owned and operated, are very fast, and tend to have hundreds of kilos of payload capacity.

Unless you have supercruise capability (which only four fighters in the world have) flying supersonic consumes and enormous amount of fuel, so flying any distance at supersonic speeds pretty much requires aerial refueling. IIRC you also need special permission to fly supersonic in US airspace. If you're limited to subsonic speeds then there's really no advantage provided by a fighter. Private jets can fly at similar high subsonic speeds (0.9-0.95 mach or so) and are usually cheaper and more efficient to operate than fighter jets.

> Private jets can fly at similar high subsonic speeds (0.9-0.95 mach or so) and are usually cheaper and more efficient to operate than fighter jets.

Thanks, those two items were the part I was missing. (I already assumed supersonic would be out for noise/ground damage reasons)

This reminded me of "Police Camera Action - The Liver Run" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTN5X4JZFjU

30 Minutes to travel 27 miles across London in the middle of the day ! Stansted Airport, Essex to Cromwell Hospital, Kensington, London

David Nott’s book War Doctor includes a tale of him being called in to perform urgent surgery in central London, having just finished a flying lesson in Essex. He apparently called 999, asked for the Police, and after explaining the situation a car was despatched to take him at high speed through traffic. Sadly I don’t have the sort of career that would ever justify that but it sounds like great fun.

Interesting. I've seen similar "convoys" of police cars with a motorcycle platoon etc with them many times. I assumed it was some VIP. I never considered it might be a organ transplant!

I do wonder if they'd do that today - save one person's life by ploughing through central London at 70mph? There are so many cyclists and pedestrians not paying attention - it would feel safer to just helicopter it over?

They would normally have used the police helicopter back then too, but it was grounded due to a recent crash.

London now has an air ambulance service, which it didn't at the time- though the air ambulance also have some impressively fast cars (Skoda Octavia vRS IIRC) for when conditions don't allow the helicopter to fly.

I mean for something like this, a dedicated corporate jet makes sense. Might cost you $10k/flight hour but that's peanuts if every minute counts.

My understanding is that unless you actually keep a jet on standby (which has its own costs), it is surprisingly difficult to beat commercial airliners on speed if the clock starts ticking now. You can always board the next flight, but with private jets it takes time to a) find a free jet and b) prepare for the flight. Of course, the more non-standard journey you have, the more edge the private jet gets.

There’s also just a lot of commercial jets everywhere. Even if you kept private jets at every airport in the world you’d be out of luck if you needed to deliver two parts from the same location.