The latest to give rise, much to her regret, to a high-flying controversy has been Taylor Swift. Despite his (alleged) concern about climate changethe empress of the pop constellation did not hesitate to resort to a private flight of just 40 seconds in duration last spring, from Los Angeles airport to a very nearby destination, to avoid a traffic jam on the Los Angeles ring roads. A few days later it was made public that the two jets owned by Swift had traveled more than 280,000 kilometers by 2023, the equivalent of a little more than seven trips around the world at the equator. It is also often said of the blonde born in Pennsylvania that she is the only woman who would be assured of defeating Donald Trump if he decides to challenge him for the US presidency in November. Taylor does not like Trump (The former Republican president says he feels for her an unrequited love), but shares with him a crucial detail: both are part of that narrow elite of Americans, between 10,000 and 15,000 human beings with means, who own and regularly use at least one private plane.
The main difference is that Swift usually flies from one concert to another aboard a real marvel, a Brand new Dassault Falcon 7X With a flight range of over 6,850 nautical miles and a luxurious cabin with room for 16 passengers, Trump, on the other hand, faithful to the (relatively) Spartan ethics instilled in him as a youth in the New York neighborhood of Queens, prefers to soar through the skies aboard an antique.
Land as you can
We are talking about a Boeing 757-200, a relic of the happy nineties that the tycoon acquired in 2010 with the money provided by his participation in the reality show from NBC The Apprentice. By then, the volatile device had already been in service since 1991. It was dangerously close to the end of its service life and belonged to a generation of the Boeing line that had already ceased to be produced. Unlike modern jets, it did not have a computerized wing and tail control system, but rather an antiquated system of buttons and bars.
The plane sat safely in a hangar from 2016 to 2020, the period when its owner was president of the world’s leading power and could afford to fly on a heavily refurbished Boeing 747 worth billions of dollars, the infamous Air Force One. In January 2021, as soon as Trump was no longer the White House’s main tenant, his 757 (then worth less than $8 million) was taken to a Louisiana garage where it received a new coat of paint. The giant T on its tail was replaced by an American flag and the plane was given a new name, a testament to its owner’s unbribable optimism and eternal aspirations: Trump Force One.
The politician on forced leave even appeared on the Truth Social network to show the new look of the old toy and tell the world something that was not at all obvious: that his plane was better than Joe Biden’s. Four years later, Trump is still clinging to the beloved contraption that Jeff Wise, a science journalist and aviation expert, describes as “a second-hand school bus.”
Wise explained A few days ago in New York Magazine that, if re-elected in three months, Trump would not only gain even broader immunity, “a handsome salary of $400,000 gross, the privilege of imprisoning Joe Biden and powers worthy of an emperor.” He could also indulge himself by replacing the outdated and precarious Trump Force One for the real Air Force One. The pale substitute for the only aircraft truly worthy of an alpha male of his caliber.
Wise quotes an anonymous private jet salesman who sums up the issue in a couple of merciless sentences: “What Trump has done is the equivalent of buying a ferry that was on its way to the scrapyard, giving it a couple of touch-ups to make it look like a recreational boat and bragging that you have the largest yacht in the world.” The journalist adds in his article that Trump is guilty of stinginess, blindness or excessive nostalgic attachment, because the personal fortune that Bloomberg attributes to him (around 6.5 billion dollars) could allow him to get “a Gulfstream G650 or a Dassault Falcon” like Taylor Swift’s, the pair of models that could be considered right now “the biggest yachts in the world.” porsche and the lamborghinis from air”.
The commercial bulletin Private Jet Clubs goes one step further by stating, mercilessly and without nuance, that “for a billionaire, Trump has a shitty plane.” The magazine also insists on comparing the obsolete 757 with the much faster, more modern and more reliable Gulfstream G650, criticizes “its obsolete mechanics and its absurd maintenance costs” and harshly criticizes the “custom” Trumpian of acquiring museum commercial aircraft in questionable condition and adding a coat of varnish to make them look jets deluxe.
He then goes on to discuss its ostentatious gold-plated silk and oak finishes and its gleaming, pompous exterior, the long periods of semi-abandonment the aircraft has suffered, exposed to corrosion in second-rate hangars, its slowness, relative lack of autonomy and problems gaining altitude (factors that make it much more vulnerable in the event of turbulence) and how ridiculous its performance is in general. Not to mention the plane’s non-sustainability, which guarantees it a carbon footprint even higher than Taylor Swift’s almost always-in-use fleet.
What do others have?
The comparison becomes even more striking if one reviews, as another media outlet specializing in air luxury has done, Jet Finder, he hardware a flying machine owned by other famous billionaires. Jeff Bezos, for example, got rid of his Dassault Falcon 900EX as soon as a Gulfstream G650ER came within his reach, at a modest price: just $75 million, which is what Amazon makes in a quiet morning.
Bill Gates is not one to follow trends and values exclusive products. That is why his private car is a technologically efficient Bombardier Global Express, capable of travelling 13,000 miles at a stretch at speeds of around 1,000 kilometres per hour. Elon Musk, more pragmatic and less technophile than Gates, has followed the same route as Bezos: from the Falcon 900 to the latest Gulfstream model. They say in Jet Finderperhaps in a display of humor, which are the choices most consistent with his “simple and austere” lifestyle.
Richard Branson, one of Musk and Bezos’ main rivals in the space race between the very rich that has the planet in suspense, is a member of the Dassault Falcon brotherhood. He also owns a somewhat battered one that costs just over 6 million dollars. His excuse is that he hardly needs it. He can use any available aircraft from his aviation company, Virgin Atlantic Flight Services.
Jet Finder, however, shows a certain respect for Trump’s Boeing 757. It includes it among the list of jets of a certain notoriety and does not refer to it in openly hostile terms, although it does point out that it stopped being worth the 100 million dollars it apparently cost many years ago. It particularly praises its 24-carat gold-plated walls and its enormous size, which allows it to accommodate a total of 43 people on board, strategically distributed among various spaces, so that the boss’s privacy is not compromised in any way.
But the key to this story may lie elsewhere. As Wise suggests, Trump’s stubborn adherence to his increasingly ineffective old-fashioned approach may be due to ideological reasons.
The former president is passionate about the history of aviation and is encouraged by feeling connected to it. It is no coincidence that one of his idols is a pioneering aviator, Charles Lindbergh, the man who crossed the Atlantic for the first time on a non-stop flight, from New York to Paris, aboard a flying tartan in May 1927 and also the unashamed, populist, nativist and isolationist politician who patented the slogan America First (America First) and whom Philip Roth imagined gaining access to the White House against all odds in his novel The conspiracy against America. Trump, as he soars across the country in the belly of his winged school bus, probably feels like the reincarnation of Lindbergh. If so, it seems clear that he will only agree to trade in his 757 for another four-year stint aboard Air Force One.
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