Aviation: Hidden in high-priced hangars at John Wayne is the fleet of posh private jets owned by O.C.’s elite.

The big metal doors are shut tight against prying eyes. There are no addresses, corporate logos or other identifying marks to give clues as to the contents of these hangars.

Ask around, though, and you’ll learn that this part of John Wayne Airport is where Orange County’s elite park their expensive business jets.

Like their entertainment industry counterparts in Hollywood and Las Vegas, these jet-setters--big names such as developers Donald L. Bren and George Argyros, and lesser-known businessmen such as Donald Sodaro--love the luxury, speed and convenience of owning their own planes.

Many business owners spent the early 1990s slashing payrolls, amputating unproductive subsidiaries and otherwise paring operating costs, but most of those who owned jets when the decade began still have them, airport sources say.

Those who cater to the private jet set in Orange County say business with their deep-pocketed clients is great.

Martin Aviation, the county’s largest general aviation and business jet service center, will open a $4-million, state-of-the-art office, restaurant and hangar facility at the county-owned airport early next month.

The private jet business, including services for visiting planes based at other airports, supports almost 200 jobs at the airport. Orange County has one of the busiest general aviation airports in the nation and has one of the largest private jet fleets. Business jets accounted for nearly 2% of all takeoffs and landings last year: a total of 10,512 “operations,” or an average of almost 29 a day.

But while airports in entertainment-oriented places such as Los Angeles, Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas are frequented by flashy jets emblazoned with their owners’ distinctive markings--singer Jimmy Buffet’s Lear jet has his trademark parrot painted on the tail--Orange County’s world of private jets is a who’s who of top businessmen. And they value privacy in what their perceive to be their private pursuits.

So while it’s not hard to find out Irvine Co. owner Bren keeps a top-of-the-line Gulfstream IV at Van Nuys Airport and has it shuttled to Orange County when needed, don’t even think of getting close enough for a peek unless you’ve got the nearly $4,000 an hour it takes to rent the 600-mph, twin-engine jet.

“The owner is a very sensitive person about privacy,” said Norm Anderson, chief pilot for Skybird Aviation, the company that operates the plane for charter when not being used for Bren-related business.

Many jet owners cite security and personal privacy as their chief reasons for staying in the background.

But the main reason for the nearly universal shyness is that the jet-owning wealthy don’t like to broadcast their affluence.

“To be frank,” said an Orange County businessman with a plane similar to Bren’s, “it’s an expense my competitors don’t have, so I don’t really want all my customers to know I own one.”

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Still, it is hard to be invisible when you regularly leave town in the leather-covered club seat of a private airplane that costs more than most people make in a lifetime.

The biggest planes in the fleet are owned by Bren; multimillionaire developer Argyros; multimillionaire restaurateur Donald Callender and fast-food giant Taco Bell Corp.

Callender, former owner of the Marie Callender’s bakery restaurant chain, keeps a $13-million Challenger 601 at Long Beach, while both Argyros and Taco Bell park their Challengers in those faceless hangars at John Wayne Airport.

One of the few jet owners willing to talk for the record about his plane, Callender said he paid cash for the wide-bodied, Canadian-built jet in 1986 when he sold the Marie Callender’s chain to Ramada Inns and was retained to head up the company’s restaurant division.

His business plans called for flying all over the country to look in on Ramada-owned restaurants and possible targets for acquisition. But the independent-minded Callender and the Ramada executive corps soon clashed. Callender left to set up a consulting business and now rarely uses the jet.

Instead, like many other business jets, it is operated for charter much of the time to defray annual upkeep costs that run about $600,000 a year for a big jet like his and can be as much as $200,000 for smaller jets.

Callender is on his fourth jet and says he’s always had a plane since getting his pilot’s license 47 years ago. But he prefers nowadays to fly his helicopter and “sit in the back seat” on the few occasions each year he takes a trip in the jet. His back seat is one of a pair of velvet-upholstered couches.

He said he flies for vacations and personal visits, usually accompanied only by his wife, their two dogs, their year-old baby, a nanny, a housekeeper and the two pilots required by FAA rules.

Callender could just as easily join the ranks of those who charter someone else’s jet when they want to go, but prefers to keep his own because he can afford it and appreciates the “ease of traveling when I want to.”

“I haven’t been on an airline in I don’t know how many years. You get next to someone who’s all sweaty . . . and there are kids runnin’ all over, and the airports, they’re just crazy. Ugh! Why do that to yourself?”

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Other Orange County jet owners include commercial developer Don Koll and home builders James and Alfred Baldwin of Baldwin Co. and Hadi Makareshian and Dale Dowers of Capital Pacific Holdings.

Those in the know say that Capital Pacific’s jet is a French-built Falcon 20, a speedy twin-engine plane that Dowers became so enamored of that he took lessons last year and obtained a pilot’s license so he can fly it. Koll, also a pilot, flies a Lear jet 35.

The Baldwins’ nine-passenger Hawker 700 is up for sale, though. Their Newport Beach home building company is mired in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the brothers are using their seven-passenger King Air turboprop these days.

Some jets in Orange County aren’t owned by the companies that use them. Instead, they are leased back from what could be called sister businesses.

Robert Gray and Marie St. John Gray, for example, are partners with their publicly traded St. John Knits in a private company that owns an older Saberliner business jet. Irvine-based St. John Knits’ proxy report reveals that the upscale women’s-wear company leased it back from the private company for $20,000 a month last year.

Several individuals affiliated with sunglass industry hotshot Oakley Inc. also own jets and lease them back to the company. An Oakley spokeswoman refused to identify the jets’ owners, but Oakley’s publicity-shy chairman, James Jannard, and Chief Executive Mike Parnell are the likely candidates. The two planes are a $12-million Falcon 50 and its $10-million sibling, a Falcon 20.

“There are people and companies here that everyone knows about that have jets, and there are people and companies no one has ever heard of that have ‘em,” said the pilot who runs an air charter business for one of the county’s big commercial builders when he’s not ferrying the boss on trips around the United States and into Europe on the plane.

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There also are a few big companies that would seem to be likely candidates for jet ownership that don’t have them.

Fluor Corp., the Irvine-based engineering and construction services company with offices and contracts sprinkled liberally across the globe, used to maintain a fleet of three business jets, two turboprop planes and a pair of helicopters. But all were sold in the late 1980s when a global recession cut deeply into Fluor’s profits.

Now Fluor “uses charters and commercial flights, whichever is most convenient, whenever someone needs to travel,” a spokeswoman said.

The message? From a pure dollars and cents point of view, owning planes isn’t all that great for the bottom line.

A 10-year-old Cessna Citation I with seating for five starts at around $800,000, which isn’t a bad deal. But aircraft brokers say that most business jets--new and used--are clustered in the $3-million to $12-million range. The biggest models now available top $22 million, and when Savannah’s Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. and Montreal’s Bombardier Aerospace Group Inc. come out with their newest models next year, prices at the top of the line are expected to hit $35 million.

Whatever the purchase price--and many businesses buy just a share in a jet under a system that works like time-share vacation condos--it is later that the real costs of jet ownership start.

Several jet owners in Orange County pay almost $90,000 a year just for hangar rent, with $24,000 to $40,000 the norm. Other costs include $25,000 to $40,000 for insurance; $125,000 or more for crews--most require two certified jet pilots and the bigger jets typically carry a flight attendant as well; $40,000 to $60,000 for routine maintenance and as much as $200,000 a year for fuel for a heavily used jet.

Most jets also get a $30,000-$75,000 paint job every five to seven years. And handcrafted cabin interiors--which can run from $50,000 for a small Lear jet or Citation to $1 million or more for a Challenger, Falcon 900 or Gulfstream IV--typically get redone every time the jet changes ownership.

“You just can’t look at jets on a cost basis. They are expensive. Period,” said Sodaro, a Corona del Mar businessman who is co-owner and pilot of a 17-year-old Falcon 10, made by the same company that builds France’s military jets.

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Sodaro, who calls his speedy plane “the family fighter,” says owning a jet makes economic sense “only if you can make your business more profitable with it than without.”

For Sodaro, owning a jet has proved invaluable.

He built up the 50-unit Six Pence Inns of America chain before selling it in 1989, and since then has run a commercial property management firm with holdings and clients all over California and in Arizona and Illinois.

After flying a 250-mph, seven-passenger turboprop for nearly seven years, Sodaro bought his first jet in 1986--a used Citation I--and says it changed the way he did business.

“I realize that a lot of people think having a jet is a waste,” Sodero said, “but we were able to do things with it that we just simply could not have done without it.”

Sodaro now uses the Falcon to scout properties for a new hotel chain he hopes to build. “It lets us get into areas that the airlines, even the commuters, don’t serve anymore,” he said.

Jets also fly higher than other planes, increasing passenger comfort and safety by getting above a lot of rough weather. They usually also are equipped with duplicate navigation, radio and flight equipment, a luxury most prop planes don’t offer. “To me, a jet is just a whole lot safer,” Sodaro said.

But that doesn’t explain the popularity of the biggest private jets. Smaller jets with fewer amenities and much lower operating costs would do the same job that most big jets do, but almost 21% of the business jets in the country are big ones.

Jet owners tend to buy the most plane they can afford, not the least. “The owners’ comfort is a big issue,” said Newport Beach aircraft broker Virginia Barton, co-owner of Heeren Aviation Consultants.

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That--and tougher federal safety equipment and record-keeping regulations for aircraft with 10 or more passenger seats--is why large Challengers and Gulfstreams, planes that could be turned into airborne buses with bench seats for 20 or more, usually are equipped to carry only nine passengers.

Not only does that make them a lot roomier for their owners, it makes them marketable in a jet charter business where there is a lot of competition.

Of the 30 business jets at John Wayne Airport, for instance, Martin Aviation has 11 under its charter license and West Coast Charters has seven. Luxury touches such as gold-plated bathroom fixtures and lots of legroom help attract charter customers for the very expensive big jets.

Callender’s plane, for example, rents out for about $3,000 an hour: Bren’s costs almost $4,000 per. And even at the low end of the charter fleet, a small Lear or Cessna Citation will cost $700 an hour or more.

Although the hourly air-time fees sound steep, if they are split among nine passengers, the roughly $14,000 charge for a 4 1/2-hour nonstop flight from Orange County to New York on Callender’s jet would come to about $1,550 each--$3,100 for a round trip.

The unrestricted first-class round-trip ride to New York from Los Angeles on a commercial carrier like American Airlines is $2,700.

And they don’t have couches.