Seven private jet airports around London. The one that suits you depends on where you are going, not on the map.

Choosing between London's private airfields is almost always presented as an aviation decision, and it is usually a road decision. The difference in flight time between two of these fields is a handful of minutes. The difference in drive time at the far end, on a Thursday evening in November, can be an hour and a half. If you are flying in from Nice, that hour and a half is a quarter of your door to door journey.

The operator will normally propose an airport based on where the aircraft is, what the runway needs to be and whether the hours work. That is the right basis for their half of the question. The half that belongs to you, or to whoever holds the diary, is which field puts you nearest the thing you came for, at the hour you will actually be driving. Those two answers do not always agree, and the conversation is worth having before the flight is confirmed rather than afterwards.

Every journey time below is a realistic range rather than a promise, taken from our own airport pages and given for quiet roads first and busy periods second. Our chauffeurs meet aircraft at all of these fields; our office is on the airfield at Luton, in Hangar 7-8 on Percival Way.

Northolt is an active Royal Air Force station in west London that accepts civil business flights alongside military and government movements, which take priority. Access is by slot and prior permission, applied for by your operator and granted at the station's discretion, and there is a long-standing annual ceiling on civil movements. Civil handling is through a single appointed agent, and there is a gate procedure for passengers and drivers that takes a few minutes and cannot be hurried. See handling at Northolt.

In exchange you get an aircraft parked a dozen or so miles from Hyde Park on the right side of the city, with no motorway ring to cross. On a good morning that is a thirty minute drive to Park Lane. For a client whose whole trip is in the West End, nothing else comes close, and it is also strong for Windsor and Ascot and for a connection at Heathrow.

London City is the only airport inside London itself with a purpose-built private terminal, the Jet Centre, and it is three miles from Canary Wharf and five from the City. The catches are real. The approach is steep enough to require specific aircraft and operator approval, which rules out a good deal of the fleet, and flights are not permitted from half past twelve on Saturday until half past twelve on Sunday. If your aircraft is cleared and your weekend fits, it is the quickest exit from an aircraft to a desk anywhere in Britain.

Luton handles a large share of London's private flights and has two private terminals, Harrods Aviation and Signature, on opposite sides of the field. Long hours, a straight run down the M1 and a deep pool of based aircraft make it the default for a great many trips, and it is where Odyssey Connections began. Being based on the airfield means our chauffeurs are minutes from either terminal when a slot moves, rather than an hour away in London.

Farnborough is the only airport in the country dedicated entirely to business aviation, with a single terminal run by the airport itself and no airline traffic at all. Published hours are 07:00 to 22:00 on weekdays and 08:00 to 20:00 at weekends and on bank holidays, which is worth checking against a late arrival. For Ascot, Sunningdale, Wentworth and Surrey it is 25 to 35 minutes and obviously right; for the West End it is a long drive that people underestimate. See the Farnborough terminal.

Biggin Hill sits inside the M25 in the London Borough of Bromley, takes no airline flights, and has two private terminals, Biggin Hill Executive Handling and Jetex. It is close in miles and slow in traffic, because there is no motorway into central London from the south east. For the City, Canary Wharf, Kent and Sussex it is excellent. For the West End at five o'clock it is not, and the answer there is often the helicopter shuttle to the London Heliport at Battersea, about six minutes in the air, with a car waiting at the other end.

Stansted is where you go when the aircraft is the constraint. The runway takes anything, the hours are not a problem, and a great many long-range aircraft are based and hangared there, which is why a client whose jet lives at Stansted will use it even when another field is nearer the meeting. Several handling companies operate on the field, including Harrods Aviation and Inflite The Jet Centre; our Stansted private terminals page sets out who is where. The practical warning is geography: the private terminals sit away from the passenger terminal on their own access roads, and a car sent to the wrong side of the field is twenty minutes from the right one. We confirm the terminal against the tail number before the day.

London Oxford at Kidlington is a different proposition altogether, and it is on this list because people keep trying to use it for London. It is roughly sixty miles out, with the drive to town running past 80 minutes on quiet roads and considerably more at peak. What it is genuinely excellent at is Oxford itself, the Cotswolds, Bicester, Silverstone and the colleges. Arrivals need prior permission and published hours are 06:30 to 22:30. See the Oxford executive terminal.

Two fields are missing from the comparison deliberately. Heathrow accepts business aircraft and has a dedicated private suite for passengers on scheduled flights, but slots are scarce and expensive and it is rarely the sensible choice for a private movement. Gatwick, with Signature on the field, works well for Sussex and the south but is a long way from anywhere in London.