AIRX
Our Founder
In 2011, John Matthews took the reins of a struggling executive jet operator, inheriting three aircraft on repossession notice and a business with no clear future.
AirX was born
By 2012, backed by early investment, Matthews had built his stake in the business to become majority shareholder.
He then assembled the team that would take AirX from €8m in charter sales to €150m by 2022, and revenue has kept climbing since: turnover now stands at over €181m, with EBITDA growing 17% year on year as a once-negative figure turned into a robust, consistently expanding profit.
Amid the COVID crisis, AirX repurposed its VIP Airbus, the world’s largest VIP Executive Jet, to fly 44 tonnes of vital medical supplies from China to the West. That same year, the company brought maintenance in-house and turned cash generative.
Today, AirX is the second-biggest private jet charter company in Europe, employing over 500 aviation professionals and maintaining its fleet of Heavy Jets and VIP airliners through its own MRO facility at London Stansted.
In September 2025, the business marked what Matthews calls “a defining moment in our 14-year journey, placing us at the forefront of a new era in private aviation”: a €115m bond raise, arranged by Arctic Securities on Nordic documentation and significantly oversubscribed by Tier-1 global asset managers and pension funds.
The raise cements AirX’s position as an institutional-grade platform and funds the next phase of growth, taking the fleet from 21 aircraft today to 50, to meet rising demand from UHNWIs, corporate clients and governments.
Matthews’ vision hasn’t changed: consolidate Europe’s fragmented private aviation market. AirX isn’t a jetcard or pre-paid membership scheme; it’s built to be the broker’s airline, putting owned and managed aircraft, reliability and standards behind the brokers who serve the end client, rather than competing with them for it.
