Gate 33 will train 100 VIP flight attendants this year. Not one hour will be spent on plating.

The EU private jet market is growing — operators need people ready to operate

The market is growing, and more people will need to be ready to operate. Gate 33 is based in Europe, so Europe is the natural place to start. In the EU-27 alone, there were 3,100 based business aircraft in 2024, compared with 3,059 the year before, generating more than 1.05 million business aviation movements.

Looking ahead, the wider European business aviation fleet is forecast to grow from just over 4,200 aircraft in 2026 to almost 5,300 by 2035, with more than 1,700 new business aircraft expected to be delivered to European customers during that period.

That growth matters because aircraft do not become operational by themselves. They need pilots, engineers, maintenance teams, handlers, FBOs, operations departments and, on the aircraft and missions that require them, cabin crew. And those people need to be trained.

The VIP course I paid for did not change my results

Gate 33 trains professionals moving into private aviation through three consecutive days of live online training with me. It is not a recorded course and it is not a workbook. I am an active corporate flight attendant currently operating a Bombardier fleet, so the course is based on what I am seeing and doing now, not simply on what I remember from several years ago.

The company exists because I could not find this type of training when I needed it myself. It took me around 120 applications to understand what private aviation operators were actually looking for. At the beginning, I thought the answer was simple: I needed a VIP flight attendant course. I also thought completing that training would open doors. That was probably my main reason for doing it, even before thinking seriously about what new service skills I would actually learn. I assumed the certificate itself would make operators look at my profile differently. It did not.

The VIP training I paid for did not change my results nearly as much as I expected, and it took me some time to understand why. If you come from an airline such as Emirates, Qatar Airways or Etihad, you have already received extremely strong service training — personalisation, anticipation, service recovery, premium product delivery, passenger reading and how to create a consistent experience onboard. For someone with that background, another generic VIP service course can easily become a service refresher. You may find yourself paying to relearn things your airline already spent weeks or months teaching you in a highly structured environment.

If you come from a low-cost carrier or have had less exposure to premium service, the situation can be different. In that case, service training may genuinely give you an important foundation. That is an important principle for me: different candidates have different gaps.

Training should not begin with, "What course can we sell this person?" It should begin with, "What is this person actually missing?" In my case, the answer was not service.

What actually changed things for me

The turning point was not another course. It was a conversation with a working VIP flight attendant who helped me restructure my CV. My experience did not change. My background did not change. I did not suddenly gain another qualification. What changed was the way I presented what I had already done.

Before aviation, I had founded a successful startup in Paris and raised €330,000 for it. I later launched two more companies in Portugal, one through an incubator programme and another where I worked in business development. During my COVID break from flying, I was Head of Operations for a Paris startup and worked closely with the founder.

For years, I treated that experience as something completely separate from aviation. It was not. Building companies had taught me how to source suppliers, manage budgets, coordinate people, work with incomplete information, anticipate problems, make decisions and find solutions when the original plan stopped working. Those are operational skills.

I had years of them, but I had barely mentioned them in those 120 applications. Once I understood that private aviation is not simply a service job but an operations job with a service component, my whole profile made more sense. That experience is a major part of what Gate 33 is built around.

Private aviation is not just service — think safety training in commercial aviation

Service matters. Of course it does. We teach cabin setup and service flow to business aviation standards, and no serious private aviation training could ignore the passenger experience. But I do not believe service should be the centre of a transition course.

The best comparison is safety training in commercial aviation. When you pass your CCA, you are trained to a common standard in safety and security. That gives you the foundation you need to work as cabin crew. But once you join an airline, the airline trains you again according to its own aircraft, procedures and SOPs. The CCA gives you the base; the operator teaches you its way of operating, and those are ultimately the procedures you follow every day.

I see service in private aviation in much the same way. Every operator has its own standards, aircraft, owners, equipment, products, service sequences and expectations. Some operations are extremely formal. Others are much more relaxed. Some focus heavily on gastronomy. Others prioritise speed, privacy or simplicity.

You can be taught one "VIP service sequence" in a classroom and discover a week after joining an operator that they want something completely different. Just as an airline ultimately teaches you its own SOPs, a private operator will teach you its own service standards.

That does not mean the foundations are unnecessary. It means we should be clear about what training before employment can realistically achieve. The harder part for many candidates is learning how to think operationally before they get there.

Why we do not spend time teaching plating

Plating is a real skill, but it takes time and practice. Nobody becomes excellent at it in a few hours during a flight attendant course. Professional chefs and hospitality specialists spend years developing presentation skills, and there is already a huge amount of high-quality material available online for anyone who wants to practise.

There are also operators like Sparfell where plating genuinely matters. Some operators have very high inflight presentation standards and may ask candidates to show photographs of previous work. If you are specifically targeting one of those operators, then of course you should develop that skill.

But for most candidates I see, plating is not the reason they are struggling to get hired. The bigger gap is usually operational.

What operational readiness actually looks like — and what we teach at Gate 33

Imagine you are operating to a city you have never visited before and need to organise catering. You have never used any supplier there. The departure time changes, so the original caterer can no longer deliver. The handler recommends someone else. One passenger has a dietary restriction, and the following destination has very limited catering options. The aircraft is away for several days.

Now you decide what should be ordered locally, what should be carried forward, what can safely be stored, what may be needed on later sectors and what will create unnecessary waste. You have to consider flight duration, departure time, passenger preferences, aircraft storage, galley equipment and the possibility that the schedule changes again tomorrow. That is operational thinking.

The same applies to provisioning across a multi-day rotation, building a menu around the duration and timing of a flight, coordinating with handlers and FBOs while timings change, managing stock across several sectors, preparing the cabin, checking equipment and completing post-flight reporting.

Then the passenger walks onboard, and everything you have been organising for hours should look effortless. That is service. The passenger sees the final result. The job is everything that made that result possible.

This is also one of the biggest differences for people transitioning from commercial aviation. In an airline, you are surrounded by infrastructure: established catering companies, loaders, cleaners, dispatchers, operations control, station staff, standard equipment, defined menus, manuals and several other crew members around you. In private aviation, depending on the operation, much more responsibility can sit with one person. You may be the person calling, ordering, checking, buying, loading, setting up, serving, clearing, reporting and then preparing for the next sector. That is why I do not think private aviation should be presented simply as a more luxurious version of airline cabin crew. The service may be more luxurious. The job itself is often much more operational.

Want to test how you would approach a real operational situation? Try the free Gate 33 Operational Assessment →

Our Academy is built around fourteen modules focused on exactly this reality: catering sourcing and ordering, provisioning, menu construction, cabin preparation, cabin setup and business aviation service flow, FBOs and handlers, stock management, client handling and discretion, working as the sole cabin crew member, operational problem-solving and the reality of rotations. We also spend significant time on positioning — a candidate who managed a business-class galley on a widebody has operational experience; someone who handled service recovery at 38,000 feet without immediate access to a manager has decision-making experience. But if those skills are not translated into language that makes sense to a private aviation operator, they disappear on the CV. That was my own bottleneck. I still see it in candidates today.

Sometimes you do not need a course — and what we do not promise

Not every candidate who comes to Gate 33 needs the Academy. Sometimes someone already understands the job but needs help with positioning. Sometimes they need more commercial aviation experience first. Sometimes they need stronger service foundations. Sometimes they need individual guidance over a longer period. That is why we also created the Gate 33 Mentorship Programme, for candidates who need more personalised and ongoing support.

And if you are not sure whether you need the Academy, mentorship or something else entirely, book a discovery call. I will look at your profile and tell you honestly what I think — including if the answer is that Gate 33 is not what you need right now.

We do not promise a job. We connect people where there is a genuine fit, and we make introductions when appropriate, but no training company controls every variable involved in hiring. Your experience, location, right to work, languages, flexibility, presentation, aircraft type, operator requirements, owner preferences, timing and market conditions all play a role.

What we can control is whether you leave Gate 33 understanding the industry better than when you arrived. We can help you understand what operators are evaluating, identify the operational skills you already have, recognise the gaps that still need work and stop wasting applications by presenting yourself for the wrong job. I would rather promise that than promise employment.

Why is the programme three days rather than a week? Because I looked at what candidates were spending on traditional in-person training and questioned how much of that cost was actually producing value. An in-person course does not only cost the course fee: flights, hotels, local transport, food and sometimes unpaid time away from work. A €1,500 or €2,000 training programme can quickly become a much more expensive decision — and there is still no guaranteed job at the end. That is why Gate 33 costs €600, or up to 24 payments with PayPal, and why the programme is delivered live online. For me, online is not a cheaper version of a real course. It is part of the model.