ON Christmas Eve, flight MY100 landed at Stansted having flown overnight from New York’s John F Kennedy airport. The passengers disembarking from the Maxjet plane may not have known it, but they were about to enter aviation history.

As the plane was taxiing, the airline’s board was getting ready for a momentous decision. Maxjet, one of a new wave of business-class-only carriers plying the Atlantic, had for several weeks been running dangerously low on cash. Last-ditch efforts to find new investors had proved fruitless.

The only option was Chapter 11, the American bankruptcy procedure that gives troubled companies limited protection from creditors. The directors, led by chairman Ken Woolley, told chief executive William Stockridge to go to the American courts, a decision that in effect wiped out shareholders and ensured Maxjet’s flying days were over. The passengers from MY100 were the last it would ever carry.

Maxjet’s demise has cast a shadow over the luxury-airline sector, which many have tipped to become the first new niche in the industry since the low-cost carriers burst on the scene in the 1990s.

“You are seeing something similar to the wave of start-ups of budget airlines in Europe 15 years ago – a lot get off the ground, but only a few go on to prosper,” said one analyst.

The concept for business-class-only airlines actually predates the low-cost revolution, with some American airline entrepreneurs having attempted start-ups in the late 1980s.

But it was not until 2005 that the dreams became a reality. Encouraged by the financial-services boom that was driving business travel across the Atlantic to new levels, several groups of entrepreneurs set up new airlines to cater for this well-heeled clientele.

Eos, which flies from Stansted to New York, was the first into the sky, followed shortly after by Maxjet. Silverjet, a British airline quoted on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), was launched last January.

Unsurprisingly, Eos and Silverjet executives say they do not think their companies will meet Maxjet’s untimely end. Silverjet, which last week reported traffic figures showing passenger numbers up 10% in December over November, believes it could break even by the summer.

“We need a 65% load-factor to break even and we are running at about 55%. All our efforts at the moment are concentrated on securing that extra traffic, and the indications are we will get there within the next three months,” said chief executive Lawrence Hunt.

Eos – which is not quoted but has raised money from private investors and institutions – has similar plans. “We are at the moment covering our direct operating costs on each flight and a little extra on top. The trick now is to increase the size of our fleet to take us to profitability at a corporate level, which should happen late this year or early next,” said Adam Komack, chief lifestyle officer at Eos.

Komack’s job title – not many airlines have chief lifestyle officers – also gives a clue as to where Eos and Silverjet believe Maxjet got it wrong. They say it lacked the amenities and style of service needed to lure elite clients.

Maxjet was unashamedly the cheapest of the three, aiming to capture value-conscious leisure travellers and small-business owners as much as the banking elite.

“What happened to Maxjet proved something we already knew – that it’s not about being business-class only. It’s about offering an experience to travellers that makes them feel special, and they didn’t do that,” said Komack.

“The product just wasn’t right,” said Hunt. “They had old-style, business-class seating, and their number of repeat customers was low.”

Maxjet executives declined to speak on the record, but one senior source defended its level of inflight service. “We were never going after those kinds of passengers – it was a value proposition,” he said.

The source also said the company had been close to securing the funding it needed to keep trading. He also pointed out that the company’s listing on AIM had not raised as much as first intended – “we originally wanted $150m (£75m), but the state of the market meant we had to settle for $100m, and use part of that to repay our original investment” – and the company had latterly been hit by high fuel costs.

There was also a chance that investors could be found to bring Maxjet out of bankruptcy, the source said. “There is always a chance, but at the moment it is a pretty slim one.”

On the day it filed for Chapter 11, most of the company’s board resigned, including Woolley, the company’s initial funder and the founder of Richmond Foods, one of Britain’s largest ice-cream makers.

Two British nonexecutive directors, Roger Flynn and Paul Kehoe, also resigned.

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