Owning a private jet is now becoming a serious PR misstep

Celebrities making 17-minute flights on private jets is inexcusable, writes Holly Baxter

Taylor Swift and Kylie Jenner have taken flak over their use of private jets (Getty/iStock)

As an expat living in the US and a journalist who reports on issues from the ground, I fly more often than most. I’m by no means a weekly jetsetter, but in the past two months I’ve travelled to the Caribbean island of Curacao, Santa Fe in New Mexico, Austin in Texas and Washington DC from my home in New York – and in a few weeks, I’ll also be travelling to the UK for my annual visit to the homeland. I can tell my Boeing from my Airbus and I have preferences on certain types of planes (the A380 is one of my absolute favourites, and you’d never catch me on a Boeing 737 Max.) I’ve mastered the art of travelling only with carry-on luggage to save time and money. I’m a member of multiple flying clubs. And one of my geekiest hobbies is researching the business and first-class offerings of airlines, just in case one day I become rich enough to actually pay for them. Aviation bloggers like The Points Guy and One Mile at a Time are my weird cup of tea.

Nevertheless, I can’t imagine ever wanting to own a private jet. In the parallel universe where I’m a billionaire, I still think I’d be happy to kick back in an Etihad Residence suite en route to the Middle East or sample caviar on Japan’s flagship airline JAL (I know, it’s very gracious of me). Owning your own plane sounds like owning your own horse: you have to find somewhere big enough for it, pay for experts to look it over, and catch the social flak of being a person who thinks it’s all necessary. These days, now everyone’s a little bit more aware of the climate crisis as the world burns in consecutive heatwaves, it seems especially egregious to travel as a singular person (entourage or no) in a full-sized aeroplane.

There’s been a lot of discussion of this lately because Kylie Jenner – of the Kardashian clan – set the world alight with an especially tone-deaf Instagram post. The post was a picture of two private jets parked together – one belonging to her, and the other to her boyfriend Travis Scott – with the caption: “You wanna take mine or yours?” Relatable this was not. Somewhat predictably, Jenner was dragged on social media. Some aviation sleuths even started looking into the flight paths that her private jet had recently taken, and pointed out one 17-minute flight from Van Nuys in Los Angeles to the nearby Californian town of Camarillo.