That Was The Week That Was 07-11 November 2022
The Richer the Person, the Thinner the Skin, Apparently
The Richer the Person, the Thinner the Skin, Apparently
It is a known fact, that 99% of the US’ attorneys are giving the rest of them a bad name. The European Business Aviation Association must know how that feels. There is the EBAA, and indeed the NBAA in the US and all the other BAAs of the world fighting the good fight, telling the world things like ‘no plane, no gain’ (a quite American one that) or that biz-av is efficient and life-saving and a test bed for new technologies, but the associations’ members’ users obviously did not get the memo.
Private aviation had a very good pandemic. Traffic figures were up and up, as the rich and nearly as rich tried to socially distance themselves literally, as well as figuratively, from the hoi polloi. Since then, according to WingX, traffic is down in Europe and flat in the US.
Nevertheless, the great and the good used, or at least tried to use, private jets to get to the COP meeting in Egypt. Maybe it was a coordinated attack on satirists. That would be the sort of thing these folk would engineer. Most celebrities and uber-rich are not that keen on being made fun of.
We know that because, in the summer, we were entertained by tracking the flights, and thus the emissions, of the rich and famous, as they jetted across the globe, or frequently, across the suburb. Truly we are moving from an era of surveillance to one of sous-veillance. Everyone carries a camera and satellites track our every move. Attacking the very rich for their emissions is the sort of flygskam we can all get behind. The French could have fun with I Fly Bernard, which started by tracking the movements of the CEO of luxury brand LVMH, Bernard Arnault. Over time, that expanded to track other members of the haute classe. In the anglosphere, there was the grandfather of these sites, @ElonJet. Elon Musk, affronted that his privacy was being infringed so blatantly, tried to buy the site, to shut it down, for $5,000. Funnily enough, he was knocked back. It could have been his for $50,000 but that was beyond the price Musk was prepared to pay. He chose to buy Twitter instead, and thus cut it off at source.
ElonJet and the argument Musk started about it spawned other sites, as people realised that each celebrity flight can be monitored, courtesy of its ADS-B data. There are Celebrity Jets, Billionaire Jet Tracker, and plenty of others. There are also plenty of members of the public with time and focus enough to track the movements and report back. Kylie Jenner took a three-minute flight in July.
Exposing the hypocrisy of celebs, always happy to make worthy statements about climate change is a goal in itself. Musk was eviscerated at the end of August for flying from San Jose to San Francisco, a flight of 45kms, or four stops on the local train. Musk supporters tried to justify it by saying that it was a positioning flight. So that is alright then. The aircraft had been positioned in San Jose, to save money on parking charges. You do not become the richest person on earth by paying more for parking, or, it seems, worrying about emissions, even as you preach the necessity of driving electric cars.
The debate, and the air-headedness of the celebrities’ justification for their luxurious lifestyle, was more than merely entertaining – as hilarious as it was – it also plays into the discussion about business aviation more generally. The French minister for transport has attempted to ban private jet flying. He is increasingly not alone and let’s be frank, going private to a COP meeting is frankly asking for trouble. That the jets could be blocked by protesters on bicycles merely adds to the humour.