Four or five times a year, Stephen Prince, a businessperson
who lives in St. Simons Island, Georgia, has taken friends, clients, and
colleagues on a hunting trip to a pheasant preserve in northwest Nebraska. A
commercial flight on that route would be arduous; if everything went perfectly,
he would probably spend at least nine hours traveling over one or two
connections, plus about an hour’s drive to the nearest commercial airport and
more time going through security, boarding and the other ritual indignities of
commercial air travel.
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But Prince, who founded a business in the 1990s that has
made a fortune printing gift cards, is a wealthy man. He purchased his first
private plane a few years ago; his current jet, a Cessna Citation 650, can do
the trip in about three hours (with a possible stop along the way to refuel)
from a small airport just a few minutes from his home.
Prince says flying private is a magical experience: He can
drive right up to the side of his plane and hop on board. Crew members will
load his bags and hunting gear and park his car. If he is flying in the
afternoon, he will be greeted with a glass of scotch; in the morning, he will
get coffee and a newspaper.
Because they typically carry so few passengers on each trip, flying private is far worse for the environment than flying commercial. According to a report by Transport & Environment, a European group that advocates zero-emissions transportation, “private jets are on average 10 times more carbon intensive than commercial flights.”
“If that doesn’t spoil you, you’re not spoilable,” he said.
“You don’t need a whole spoonful of private aircraft to find out what it tastes
like; it’s pretty amazing.”
As much as he loves it, though, Prince has decided to kick
his high-flying habit. A progressive activist — he is the vice chair of Patriotic
Millionaires, an organization of wealthy people who favor higher taxes on rich
people like themselves — Prince argues that flying private is just too
expensive and unfair. Not for him, but for the rest of us and for the planet.
His group is not calling on other private flyers to ground their planes but
maintains that if rich people are going to continue to jet around in luxury,
they should at least be taxed for the privilege.
According to an analysis published this month by Patriotic
Millionaires and the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank,
private jet users pay nowhere near their share of the cost of maintaining US
airports and airspace.
Every commercial airline passenger in America is subject to
a 7.5 percent tax on domestic ticket prices, a facility charge of up to $4.50
per flight segment (up to a maximum of $18 for a round trip), and extra charges
for flights to Alaska, Hawaii, or international travel. Private flyers only pay
fuel surcharge taxes of about 22 cents a gallon, according to the analysis. As
a result, though they make up about 16 percent of all flights handled by the
Federal Aviation Administration, private jet flights “contribute just 2 percent
of the taxes that make up the trust fund that primarily funds the FAA.”
Per the analysis, “the median net worth of a full and
fractional private jet owner is $190 million and $140 million respectively.” In
other words, some of the richest people in the world are effectively being
subsidized by plebes like you and me flying coach.
"Flying private is 'probably one of the most greedy, selfish things I’ve ever done in my life.”
Then there is climate change. Because they typically carry
so few passengers on each trip, flying private is far worse for the environment
than flying commercial. According to a report by Transport & Environment, a
European group that advocates zero-emissions transportation, “private jets are
on average 10 times more carbon intensive than commercial flights.”
When I spoke to Ed Bolen, the CEO of the National Business
Aviation Association, a trade group that represents the private air travel
industry, he challenged several of IPS’ claims. Private planes can fly to
thousands of airports around the country that aren’t served by commercial
flights, Bolen said, allowing businesses to operate across a wider geography
than would otherwise be possible. He also argued that air travel infrastructure
is designed largely to suit the needs of large commercial planes, so it made
sense for commercial airliners to bear a larger share of the cost of
maintaining the system. And he said that his industry is committed to improving
its environmental impact; the NBAA has pledged to achieve net-zero carbon
emissions by 2050.
Prince is not convinced. Flying private is “probably one of
the most greedy, selfish things I’ve ever done in my life,” he said. “I just
can’t continue to do it.”
A lot of other private flyers seem to have no such worries.
Private jet travel hit record levels last year, and many manufacturers and
operators have reported surging demand.
Part of this surge might be due to favorable tax laws for
private jet ownership. Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut allowed businesses to deduct
100 percent of the cost of a plane from their tax bills immediately, making
buying a jet a very pleasant way to reduce a business’s taxes. And as
ProPublica recently reported, it’s pretty easy for wealthy people to use their
business jets for leisure travel; the law allows them to keep their deduction
as long as they use the plane mostly for business travel, an indefensible
giveaway.
Last year, the marketing company Yard used data from
@Celebjets, a Twitter account that tracked celebrities’ private flights (and
has since been suspended by Twitter), to calculate how much time some
luminaries spent aboard their planes. Yard’s top-flying celeb was Taylor Swift,
whose jet spent nearly 23,000 minutes — about 16 days — in the air in the first
half of last year, spewing more than 1,000 times more carbon into the
atmosphere than the average person does in a year. (Swift’s representative
disputed the numbers, explaining that the jet is often lent out to others.)
@Celebjets’ data has revealed another cringey phenomenon:
The very short private jet trip, a pollution-belching flex that is the height
of irresponsibility. Last year, Floyd Mayweather took a 10-minute flight
between Henderson, Nevada, and Las Vegas — a roughly 15-mile trip that would
have taken him about 20 minutes by car. Kylie Jenner took a 17-minute flight
between two Southern California suburbs, a drive that would have taken less
than an hour. There’s only one word I can think of to describe this sort of
reckless extravagance: shameful.
The Institute for Policy Studies suggests several sensible
ideas that might slightly curb such excess. The group proposes a surcharge on
flights shorter than 337km, close to the distance between Kennedy Airport and
Reagan National Airport. IPS also recommends a tax on sales of private aircraft
— 10 percent on purchases of used planes, 5 percent on new ones — and a
doubling of the fuel tax for private jets. The group estimates that Elon Musk —
whose plane took 171 trips in 2022, according to Bloomberg — would have paid
about $4 million more in taxes under its proposals.
For Musk, that would not break the bank, and it is hard to
imagine that IPS’ proposals would halt the private jet boom. But asking private
flyers to pick up a little more of their aviation tab would be a good first
step toward a more equitable transportation system.
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