Most of us must contend with the miseries and indignities of commercial air travel, but thankfully we have billionaires through which to live vicariously. And since we last looked, it's been a frenetic period of hardware upgrades for the antipodean jet set.

Media baron Rupert Murdoch has been getting around in News Corp's best runabout – a Gulfstream 650 – for more than three years now. The Sun King was an early adopter (the model only debuted in December 2012) of the only corporate-size jet that can ply the Pacific from eastern Australia to the western United States non-stop. Other Aussies (we're still counting KRM as one, even if he surrendered his passport in 1984) who've taken the plunge include Westfield billionaire Frank Lowy and Multiplex heir Tim Roberts (who leases his to Gina Rinehart).