>Setting aside the environmental impact of flying private, you'd think all those brilliant minds could come up with some kind of solution beyond flying further away and driving into Portugal. Maybe a jet that hundreds of people can charter at once?

Seems like there's a business model here -- create a company that owns large aircraft and have some kind of booking engine that lets people book seats on those airplanes. Maybe have those planes travel on a fixed schedule to let people plan travel in advance.