"Any new business venture requires an element of luck to get off the ground, or at least it needs to avoid any particularly bad luck," says Lynch Williams. Since establishing his company in 2003, he has witnessed the emergence and decline of a number of brokers and operators. Experience tells him that the Smarter Air Charter way of interacting personally with clients, despite the bottom line hit this usually necessitates, has proved to be the right thing to do.

"We don’t want to be just a price on the internet," he continues. In the ad hoc charter market, where there are no ongoing contractual ties to bind operator to client, his company strives to make the kind of difference that attracts repeat business and, equally vital, word-of-mouth recommendations. "We tried advertising – it didn’t work. Exemplary service did and does. We even officially trademarked a strapline reflecting this culture: Aviation that’s distinctly more civil.”

He identified his niche market early on, recognising through long-held Special Forces connections that there was potential for cooperation with the security and close protection industry. HNWIs, celebrities or those travelling in politically turbulent regions were all potential clients, and he took the decision to offer specialist services to this demographic. Lynch Williams gained his own Close Protection License through the UK Security Authority in order to support those looking to offer their principals a secure private charter formula.

He has provided his services to some big names since those early days; watching the sun rise over the apron at Le Castellet with Angelina Jolie, seeing the snows of Bulgaria with Tommy Lee Jones, sharing a private box at the Albert Hall with Michelle Pfeiffer and a transatlantic G4 flight with Sienna Miller, getting a thank you kiss in the desert from Nicole Kidman, going to Colombia with Jeremy Clarkson and, taking Brad Pitt’s sons to the Farnborough Air Show.

But that's not all. "Some years ago I was waiting at the FBO at Istanbul airport for the arrival of Russell Crowe. We were supporting him on location in Turkey for the filming of Noah and The Water Diviner, for which SAC got its first Hollywood credit. I was pretty nervous in anticipation of our first meeting and mentally prepared some patter to at least soften the impact of any unintended gibbering on my part. I wondered whether to talk about movies, Turkey, sport? And then it dawned on me, rugby - he has his own professional rugby team in Sydney, the Rabbitohs.

"When Russell Crowe came through the airside door wearing a Varsity Rabbitohs jacket I blurted out, unoriginally and to my eternal shame: "Hey, nice jacket." You could hear a pin drop in the silence that followed, so I quickly took the passports and handed them to the local officials for processing. I did mumble a few slightly more intelligent comments about the upcoming arrangements before the bemused passengers were whisked away from the airport through Istanbul. I sat with the bags in the rear SUV, head in hands, reflecting on my lack of diplomacy until we pulled up outside the Four Seasons.

"One of the security team opened my door and told me the Gladiator star wanted a word with me. I dragged my feet up to the hotel entrance where Russell Crowe looked me up and down, said he thought I would be about an XL and that he would get a jacket delivered to my address. He winked, and the jacket was there when I got home. He’s now a regular client, we’ve been supporting him all this summer."

Lynch Williams also realised early on that a responsible and sustainable attitude towards environmental matters was important, so since April 2006 the company has regularly contributed to non-profit Treeflights, which has planted over a million trees in Africa by way of carbon offset. Treeflight director Ru Hartwell believes that Smarter Air Charter might claim to be the world’s first aviation company to have taken positive action in this vital area.