If you buy a plane for a company, and it's used 100% for business travel, there is no problem at all.
If you buy a plane for a company, and it is used less than 100% for business travel (the rest being private use by the proprietor) then
- Customs tend to be happy with that, so long as the private use is fully reimbursed to the company, plus VAT of course
- Revenue will be interested in the Benefit in Kind issue, but I am not going to type reams on this since I've already done that, and as bose-x suggests there is a LOT of "envy" investigations going on today.
A purchase for a zero-equity group (i.e. a purchase by a company, typically, with the objective to rent it out to a number of people) is possible to get by C&E but the Revenue really hate it unless they see nice cheques for corp. tax - which they won't because the capital allowances alone will wipe out taxable profits for years to come. You can do this if every pilot is a part owner of the company, but that isn't a zero equity group.
For an equity group, there isn't any point in VAT registering because while you can potentially claim back VAT, you have to invoice everybody with VAT so there is a lot of paperwork and exactly zero gain.
So, for any significant private use, I would strongly suggest purchasing via Denmark and you can then forget the whole VAT reclaim business.
There is a considerable variation around what people get away with, due to varying practices around tax offices around the UK, and also due to very different approaches to the subject by the Revenue and Customs (even though the two are supposedly together now as HMRC). So it's no suprise that people say they've had no problems.
The Revenue are absolute swines and bastards these days. Gone is the relative professionalism of the 1970s and 1980s. The inspectors are on a bonus scheme for promotion and don't earn all that much either. They know they can randomly hit any business involving boats, planes, or horses and if they run the enquiry for a year or more the proprietor is sure to give them 4-5 figures to get rid of them, and this is exactly what I did last year. One inspector can hit 10-20 companies a year in this way, and he gets good points for that. There is no justice unless you go to General Commissioners but you won't get a tax barrister for under £10k.