Magic Moments

Uplifting stories from the world of VistaJet.

The Running Man

When entrepreneur Kyle Vogt decided to run seven marathons in seven continents over four days back in 2020, the numbers—whichever way you looked at them—didn’t stack up. But logic and common sense be damned: When you’re asked to help make a world-record dream become a reality, you find a way. For the team at VistaJet, that meant plotting out a globe-trotting route with military precision and not a leg out of place.

It meant flying at specific flight levels in order to shave off precious minutes on every journey. It meant recruiting a dedicated onboard engineer and having backup jets at the ready at every stop, just in case anything happened to go wrong. And it meant sourcing perfectly balanced plant-based meals, in all four corners of the globe, to ensure our marathon man had all the energy he needed at every step.

When Vogt crossed the final finish line— recording a time of 81 hours, 38 minutes and 46 seconds—the new world record emphatically belonged to him. But a small part of it, perhaps, will always belong to the team at VistaJet, too.

A Plea for Pizza

Ask any Neapolitans worth their salt where the best pizza in the world comes from, and they’ll tell you all about Da Michele—a tiny, ancient, hole-in-the-wall spot down in the Porto neighborhood of Naples. Something to do with the water used for the dough, they say, or the richness of the tomatoes—or perhaps the fact that the place has been family run since 1870.

What they’ll also mention, though, is that Da Michele doesn’t do delivery or takeaway under any circumstances whatsoever. Unless, perhaps, you have seven hungry clients desperate to try the legendary delicacy as they wait for their flight to depart from Naples’s local airport.

Facing a nigh-onimpossible task, a member of our private-dining team suddenly remembered he went to school with one of the chefs at Da Michele and—after what seemed like hours of reminiscing, serenading and haggling— persuaded him to allow us to collect seven pizzas and deliver them personally to the airport and into the welcoming arms of our clients.

It was a huge mountain to climb for just $22 worth of pizzas. But you can’t put a price on that dough.

A Trek to the Track

Racing drivers are accustomed to speed, but as the pandemic peaked, most of them discovered they were going nowhere fast. One day, we got a call saying that a driver needed to fly to Italy by noon the following day to take part in an all-important race— and that all the commercial routes were unavailable.

“So it’s the middle of a pandemic, and you’ve got a Brazilian national flying from Croatia to Italy, and the nearest aircraft is in Paris,” explains one of the VistaJet team. “It looked like an impossible task. We had to ferry the aircraft from Paris to Croatia in order to pick the driver up. We had to get approval from both Croatia and Bologna airports to take off and land. And we had to do this in the middle of the night, when everything was closed and everyone was asleep.

“But I said, ‘We’ll find a way.’ And we did. I didn’t go to bed until I found out he had arrived safely the next morning and he’d made it to the race on time. So it all worked out. He was incredibly happy and rested. And I was a little tired . . . ”