My First Gulfstream
October 9, 2016 5:49 PM   Subscribe

My First Gulfstream In 1998, Vanity Fair published this account by an anonymous "information entrepreneur" (rumored to be Nathan Myhrvold) about the process of buying a private jet.
posted by mecran01 (38 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Good read! I used to work in the charter aviation industry, it was a strange and unique world -- an odd mix of government safety regulations and opulent wealth... mixed with the sort of podunk Trenton airport.
posted by so fucking future at 6:35 PM on October 9, 2016 [4 favorites]


Really self-aware and well-written, I like this guy, whoever he is.
posted by subdee at 7:00 PM on October 9, 2016 [5 favorites]


Private jets are perhaps the most coveted and yet most taboo status symbols in today’s society. For some, they are the epitome of conspicuous consumption, a contemptible and wretched excess symptomatic of rot from within.

Probably more true in 1998... as a society we've become more used to/accepting of conspicuous consumption among the very rich, I feel like.
posted by subdee at 7:09 PM on October 9, 2016 [6 favorites]


Wanna bet memory foam is now de rigueur?
posted by quaking fajita at 7:12 PM on October 9, 2016


Actually I take it back, memory foam is what cheap mattresses are made of. There's probably something else.
posted by quaking fajita at 7:12 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's probably a bespoke viscoelastomer with multiple proprietary urethane formulations.
posted by jenkinsEar at 7:39 PM on October 9, 2016 [19 favorites]


It's probably very well-trained baby seals who can also make a perfect martini.
posted by sexyrobot at 8:03 PM on October 9, 2016 [12 favorites]


Who needs a Gulfstream when you have GoToMeeting.com?
posted by oceanjesse at 8:41 PM on October 9, 2016 [5 favorites]


I'll bet a hundred bucks that memory foam is out, and latex is in.
posted by oceanjesse at 8:43 PM on October 9, 2016


Really self-aware and well-written, I like this guy, whoever he is.

Same here.
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:02 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


What good is owning one of those planes, if you can't fly it yourself?
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 9:46 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


You wouldn't fly it. You have people for that.
posted by bigtex at 10:12 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


I think both John Travolta and Harrison Ford own private jets and the licenses to fly them.
posted by Harald74 at 11:20 PM on October 9, 2016


Oddly fascinating. Or just well written I guess. Who hasn't dreamt this dream
posted by jcruelty at 11:35 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]


I can't bring myself to believe Nathan Myhrvold is this cool.
posted by the marble index at 11:40 PM on October 9, 2016 [4 favorites]


I'll bet a hundred bucks that memory foam is out, and latex is in.

I'm pretty sure this is true based on my hipster friends, because latex is 'natural' and 'ecological' and therefore worth worshiping. Too bad that's it's horribly allergenic for a significant portion of the population.
posted by shelleycat at 1:45 AM on October 10, 2016


The key point here is that for this guy, owning the jet is not about showing off (except that having dropped $10M on it he was willing to spend another $1M on the interior so that it didn't feel like a shitty Motel Six), but that previously he was burning 240-300 hours a year—weeks—of his life on regular airline travel. This was pre-9/11, so in the post-2001 security climate he could probably look forward to adding another 50 hours of standing in security lines, removing his belt and shoes, and bending over for the TSA: even flying first class doesn't get you out of that.

A jet isn't something you replace every year: they've got a design life of 30 years. So basically he decided to spend about $1.5M a year (amortized over a decade and a bit) to buy back a couple of months of his life from the TSA and airlines.

If you earn over $6M a year, that makes a lot of sense. And by all accounts, if this is Myrvhold, he earns a lot more than that, and if he feels guilty about the environment he can afford to plant the odd forest to offset his carbon emissions each year.

TLDR: it's the billionaire equivalent of saying "fuck this shit", ditching the transit pass, and buying a car. I can't criticize his decision; all I can criticize is the way our wildly uneven wealth distribution and our shitty mass transit infrastructure collide to enable an industry which by this account is more replete with bullshit than investment banking.
posted by cstross at 2:39 AM on October 10, 2016 [30 favorites]


BTW, Rob Halford flies Ed Force One on tour
posted by mikelieman at 2:42 AM on October 10, 2016


Here's their long-form video Iron Maiden - Ed Force One Special

posted by mikelieman at 2:44 AM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


(Bruce Dickinson not Halford. But yeah that's awesome.)
posted by atoxyl at 2:48 AM on October 10, 2016 [4 favorites]


I think both John Travolta and Harrison Ford own private jets and the licenses to fly them.

But no one tops Bruce Dickenson of Iron Maiden, who not only flies and owns the tour plane (Boeing 767) but is a licensed commercial pilot with one of the fastest growing aviation services companies in the UK.

My dad's friend is a commercial jet pilot, his last job was flying NYC bankers. They kept the plane in Chicago (as cheaper than Teterboro), and his job was once per week fly to NYC to pick them up for an international flight to either Milan or China.

The odd thing about private jet world is that there aren't cabin crew. Through very odd happenstance I had one experience with it, on a corporate Gulfstream GV cross country flight., when I was only 20 years old. It felt odd and wrong to be served shrimp cocktail by a highly qualified professional pilot.
posted by C.A.S. at 2:54 AM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


(Bruce Dickinson not Halford. But yeah that's awesome.)

It was a long, crazy night, and it's too early to be at work this morning.
posted by mikelieman at 3:04 AM on October 10, 2016


However beguiling the humility, myhrvold is anything but a nice guy. He's a parasite who should be considered criminal.
posted by smoke at 3:33 AM on October 10, 2016 [13 favorites]


The Gulfstream IV, in case anyone wants to know. The article doesn't have a pic.

They're quite comfortable.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:56 AM on October 10, 2016


Though, my former employer preferred his Falcon 20. Much less ostentatious.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:04 AM on October 10, 2016


His suspicion of being fleeced on the interior is misleading. Because the interior materials need extensive flammability testing, and anything electrical/electronic needs additional testing to make sure it doesn't draw too much power for the wiring and won't interfere with aircraft avionics, the costs get multiplied quickly. Imagine that if on top of a skilled craftsman building and installing your custom closet with a circular back wall and extremely precise tolerances, made of advanced composite sandwich panels and covered in exotic wood veneer, you have another skilled technician doing hours of burn tests in a lab, and one or two engineers writing reports to prove the closet meets structural, flammability, and cabin evacuation requirements. Add a light to the closet and you have another report to write.

It's expensive, but that's the cost of making sure your plane doesn't burst into flames or break into impalable shards in a hard landing, using the same standards more or less as are used on airliners (minus any economies of scale because everyone wants a custom job).
posted by cardboard at 5:08 AM on October 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


It was a long, crazy night, and it's too early to be at work this morning.

Living after midnight?
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 7:32 AM on October 10, 2016 [6 favorites]


"Playing the lottery is a tax on...." but on one of the massive pots I played and wow, best entertainment dollar ever spent, the *daydreams* for a few days were in technicolor. So at one point I got curious on a 500 million win could you afford a jet "to take elderly relatives to visit eastern Europe". Well not really. The after tax payout is basically 1/4 so 125 million, after rational investments and family uses a 10-50 million splurge that cost 1-2 million a year to use would use up that nest egg pretty darned fast.

(shifted the daydreams to high performance glider/sailplanes that would be so much more fun)

Wondering about current income disparities compared to the Czar vs serfs just prior to the revolution. I'd say "eat the rich" but seagull probably tastes better...
posted by sammyo at 7:51 AM on October 10, 2016


One interesting thing about this is that while the author does some hand-wringing about the truly staggering cost, his own privilege, et cetera, there's no mention of the environmental impact of burning twelve ounces of fuel per second.

If this article were written in 2016 instead of 1998, omitting any mention of climate change would be unimaginable.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 7:51 AM on October 10, 2016 [4 favorites]


At one level, the executive jet is just part of the standard CEO utility belt. One of my abiding memories of flying into Barcelona for a big 3G convention (in an eighty quid return seat in the back of a loco 737 with five quid sandwiches, of course) was taxyiing past seemingly hundreds of private jets parked up like so many cars. Every CEO of every mobile outfit was there; there are quite a lot of those in the world and who wasn't going to take their company tin to town?

(I was more impressed by those who'd hired a yacht, and really quite approving indeed of those who then threw parties on board. I can't top the story an old-hand PR told of having her party crashed by Richard Branson during the early days of Virgin Mobile, and having to hijack his Rolls-Royce to go into town at 2am to wake up a wine seller because the champagne was running out. They threw stones at his bedroom window, and he was really unamused. Until the huge wodge of cash came out, when he cheered up. Well, I could top that, but I plead the Fifth.)
posted by Devonian at 7:52 AM on October 10, 2016 [10 favorites]


(OK, one last story. When Sinclair Research was going down the tubes in 1985, a potential white knight - I think it was Robert Maxwell, of all people - sent in an accountant to go over the books. He was a cheery fellow, well-used to such tasks, and at his first visit with the board he tried to make the best of things. Sinclair Research was never big, and to all appearances it just ran its business as a Cambridge company with no particular global interests.

"In my experience," the accountant said as the coffee was poured and the books distributed, "you really know things are hopeless if the company's just bought an executive jet."

"Page four of the asset sheet..." said the CFO, morosely.

"Aaahh...."

(Sinclair had had a six-seater for quite some time, as it happened; the company's manufacturing was at the Timex plant in Dundee, and it actually made a lot of sense to be able to get there quickly and often. The second aircraft, however...)
posted by Devonian at 8:05 AM on October 10, 2016 [7 favorites]


In terms of carbon emissions, using a private jet is pretty much the worst thing a person can do in their individual capacity. If one literally picked up an axe and started chopping old-growth trees down, that would have far less of an impact.
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:13 AM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


This made me laugh:

A new switch—say, for a reading light—was $300.

I'm an airplane owner -- knock two or three zeroes off all the dollar amounts and that could be me. Instead of a G-IV I have a little two-seat sport plane (a Citabria, for any pilots reading), and my "cross country" trips are more like San Francisco to LA or Portland -- but the feeling of "every little thing starts at $1000, so why not add this ridiculous gadget that's 'only' $199.99..." is very familiar.

(Not being a lottery winner I need to economize elsewhere so I can afford the airplane -- for instance, I have no car; and I need to save some money to buy a sailplane (glider). At least I don't have to pay for a "chief pilot, co-pilot, and their 401(k)s"....)
posted by phliar at 12:42 PM on October 10, 2016 [7 favorites]


sammyo:
So at one point I got curious on a 500 million win could you afford a jet "to take elderly relatives to visit eastern Europe". Well not really. The after tax payout is basically 1/4 so 125 million, after rational investments and family uses a 10-50 million splurge that cost 1-2 million a year to use would use up that nest egg pretty darned fast.
You don't even need to make any smart economic decisions to make 1-2 million in interest on that much money. Any bank should be able to offer you 2% yearly RoI. Spend a little bit to get a seasoned financial advisor and even an idiot could afford a private jet if they happened to come into that much money.
posted by simen at 9:33 PM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


it's the billionaire equivalent of saying "fuck this shit", ditching the transit pass, and buying a car.

The intermediate is an air taxi, which is just as it sounds, a plane for hire.

One of the main reasons business class exists is flexibility. You can often book up to the last hour, even the last minute and still get on the plane. Miss one, you can book the next without too much penalty. When your company is sending 6-8 folks and they're rushing a deadline, paying business rates to fly, the air taxis become reasonable. And they have all the advantages mentioned, often their own entrance or terminal, private (fast) security screening, and a plane that can essentially leave on your schedule, no rebooking.

There's a middle ground, rental as needed. I'm a bit surprised he didn't mention it. There has to be a break-even when taxis cost more than owning, but unlike a bus/car tradeoff, that bar is pretty high. Just the costs to have a plane are huge, even before it takes off---nothing at all like car ownership. Imagine paying 10-25% of the value of the car per year just to keep it running.
posted by bonehead at 7:45 AM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


There is a another middle ground between charters/taxi and owning a jet: fractional ownership.
posted by Mitheral at 7:55 AM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Imagine paying 10-25% of the value of the car per year just to keep it running.

I just put $1,500 of repairs into our Ford Econoline, which has a blue book value of $5,000. It can't fly, however (that I know of).
posted by mecran01 at 8:01 AM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


At work we used to have planes like that---built in the 40s and 50s respectively---still really great airframes for their respective missions, better than what could be had new in one case, but absolutely fully amortized purchase prices.

They had a nominal sale value, but the annual costs, inspection, maintenance and the two mechanics we needed to keep them going, was quite a bit more than that: 3/4 of a million for the old WW2 vet and 2 million for the turboprop from the 50s. They cost more sitting around for a year than they could be sold for.

We were forced to get rid of them as they just weren't used enough to justify costs. Some years they more than made money rented out, other years they blew our budget away. After a couple of years of losses, mostly caused by client delays, management cut the program.
posted by bonehead at 8:07 AM on October 11, 2016


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