There was once a time in aviation when aircraft manufacturers and travelers alike were obsessed with going as fast as possible. For a moment in time, aircraft like the Concorde and the Convair 990 made the world smaller by connecting distant points in only a matter of hours. For Canadian business jet builder Bombardier, that time has returned. Its first Global 8000 bizjet, the world’s fastest passenger aircraft since the Concorde, with a top speed of Mach 0.94, is nearing completion. Oh yeah, speed is back, baby.
The world of commercial aviation has seen a shift in recent decades. As Forbes reported in 2022, flights were actually faster three decades ago. A flight from London to New York City might have taken around seven hours in the 1990s. Those same flights now often an hour longer despite the fact that more advanced aircraft are now flying that route. If you’ve been a lifelong traveler and feel like things have gotten slower, you’re not wrong!
A lot of it comes down to the almighty dollar. Flying faster burns more fuel, which in turn means a flight is more expensive to operate. We live in an era where you can fly over a thousand miles for less than the price of a tank of gas in a small car. Airlines have saved tens of millions of dollars just by making their aircraft fly slower.
Some flights are also artificially slower. You may board a flight with an estimated duration of four hours, but arrive 20 minutes early. That’s intentional and it helps keep an airline keep an on-time schedule. By scheduling a flight to take longer than it actually does, the flight crew has some buffer in case of unexpected delays.
But it’s also not just flying slower to save cash, either. A lot of aircraft and engine development is centered on increasing efficiency and lowering emissions rather than blistering speed.
So, with all of this focus on efficiency and saving money, it’s fascinating to see some companies still obsessed with going really fast. Recently, I’ve written about one of the many companies trying to make supersonic transports a thing again. Bombardier isn’t going that crazy. Instead, its new Global 8000 is a more traditional bizjet, but it’s a real hot rod.
From Snowmobiles To Jets
The Bombardier Global 8000 has been doing the news rounds for the past week and that has had me scratching my head. I thought, “didn’t I write about that three years ago?” Indeed, I have! Bombardier announced the Global 8000 back in 2022, but it has taken until now to build the very first production Global 8000 aircraft. So, if you feel like you’ve read something like this before, you’re not crazy!
For many folks, Bombardier was once the name adorning snowmobiles, motocross motorcycles, and Sea-Doo watercraft. However, the legendary Canadian name has been slapped on so many more products out there, including jets, buses, and railway rolling stock. If you’re one of our many readers living in or near New York City, you might have even ridden in one of the R62A cars that Bombardier built for the New York City Subway.
[Editor’s Note: Bombardier also built their own version of the Volkswagen Iltis military off-roader! Just fun to mention. – JT]
One Bombardier’s biggest events was the purchase of Canadair Ltd. in 1986. At the time, Canadair was best known for taking Bill Lear’s Learstar 600 idea and turning it into the CL-600 Challenger business jet. Unfortunately, the early Challenger 600 program was plagued by delays and issues. Getting the Challenger off the ground cost Canadair so much money that it nearly went bust.
Bombardier’s engineers went nuts with the Challenger, transforming it into a frontrunner in business aviation. But that isn’t even the crazy part. Bombardier also took note that the Challenger had the ability for a 2+2 seating arrangement. As AIN writes, Bombardier engineers basically took the Challenger design and stretched it out, creating the Canadair Regional Jet (CRJ), which made its first commercial flight in 1992. If you’ve ever thought that the CRJ series looks awfully like lengthy private jets, you actually aren’t that far off.
In the decades since, Bombardier engineered a new regional aircraft, the CSeries, then divested that to Airbus after a chaotic development timeline and even a spat with Boeing and the U.S. International Trade Commission. The CRJ was also passed to the Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation in 2020, which resulted in the death of the CRJ program. Bombardier had also divested its interests in other markets. The powersports division was sold off in 2003 and became BRP, the transportation division was acquired by Alstom 2020, and Bombardier even sold off its military division in 2003.
So, the company that used to have its name in so many things is really only now focusing on business aviation, and my, Bombardier is going hard with this one.
When A Commercial Plane Doesn’t Cut It
The Global 8000 is based on Bombardier’s Global series. Bombardier began development on the Global series in the early 1990s to build a larger, longer-range aircraft than the Challenger 600. Engineers from Bombardier, Mitsubishi, and Rolls-Royce worked together using computer-aided design, computational fluid dynamic software, and finite-element analysis software to create the first Global Express, which entered service in 1999.
These early Global jets were quite successful, and convinced Bombardier to take the idea even further to create even bigger jets that flew farther. In the late 2000s, Bombardier decided to build the largest purpose-built business jet on the market with the longest range in all of private aviation. Development on the Global 7000, later renamed to Global 7500, officially kicked off in 2010 and Bombardier’s demands were so great that engineers started with a clean-sheet design, from Bombardier:
The clean-sheet and innovative Global 7500 aircraft design and development involved the collaboration of more than 2,000 Bombardier engineers and suppliers. The engineering effort entailed millions of person hours invested by dozens of teams and involved coordination and teamwork of numerous major structural and systems suppliers.
Among the many design innovations that set Bombardier’s Global 7500 aircraft apart from its competitors is its advanced wing design. With its sophisticated slats and flap system, the aircraft’s wing maximizes aerodynamic efficiency and performance for improved safety and an exceptionally smooth ride. The Global 7500 aircraft also outpaces its rivals in performance, with a proven ability to fly farther, faster, and with its unique steep-approach capability, provides passengers access to challenging airports such as London City. In the cockpit, the next generation fly-by-wire technology blends advanced avionics with exceptional ergonomics and control to ensure the most complete flight envelope protection.
The design innovation extends to the manufacturing process as well. The aircraft is assembled at Bombardier’s Toronto facility using innovative and highly repeatable processes. Cutting-edge technology, such as laser-guided positioning combined with sophisticated robotics, contribute to predictable outcomes and the highest quality standards on each aircraft.
The Global 7500 went on to set 100 speed records by March 2025, including one flight in which a Global 7500 flew from San Luis Obispo, California, to London Biggin Hill Airport in a quick nine hours and 17 minutes. Another Global 7500 managed to fly a record 8,225 nautical miles from Sydney to Detroit non-stop. Bombardier says that was the longest flight ever recorded in business aviation.
The Global 7500 is officially rated for a top speed of Mach 0.925 and a baseline range of 7,700 nautical miles. So, what does Bombardier do next? Make the 7500 even more insane by squeezing more speed out of the design.
The Fastest Civil Passenger Jet
How crazy is the Global 8000? This new jet can fly up to 8,000 nautical miles between refueling stops or fly up to a top speed of Mach 0.94.
To put that into perspective, the Boeing 747-400 has a Maximum Mach Operating speed (MMO) of Mach 0.92. The bigger 747-800 and the colossal Airbus A380 are also really quick at Mach 0.90. A common Airbus A320? That’ll go about Mach 0.82. How about aircraft in the business space? Well, the Cessna Citation X+ goes Mach 0.935, the Gulfstream G650 flies Mach 0.925, and the HondaJet goes 0.72 Mach.
To be clear here, I’m using Mach for speed because you can’t really just convert Mach into MPH. Mach speed changes with altitude. Theoretically, a plane flying Mach 1.00 exactly at sea level would be traveling 762 mph over the ground. Yet, at an altitude of 40,000 feet, Mach 1.00 equates to 660 mph. All you need to know here is that these planes are really fast.
You also need to know that since the initial announcement in 2022, Bombardier is nearing completion of the very first production version of the Global 8000. This aircraft, which is built in the Greater Toronto Area, is expected to take flight later this year, officially kicking off service.
Bombardier hasn’t spoken much about how it made the Global even quicker, but does say that part of the secret sauce is in the specially-designed General Electric Passport turbofans pushing 18,920 lbf of thrust. Bombardier is describing this as getting two planes in one, sorta.
If you’re willing to go no faster than Mach 0.85 with no more than about 8 passengers and 4 crew onboard, the Global 8000 should fly 8,000 nautical miles, and that’s with more juice left for reserve.
If you say screw that, let’s get somewhere really fast, the aircraft has an ultra-high speed cruise rating of Mach 0.92, which is a faster cruise speed than you’ll fly on any commercial aircraft. In other words, the high end cruise of the Global 8000 is faster than the top speeds of some jets.
To add some icing to the crazy, Bombardier says that in May 2021, a Global 7500 test aircraft (above) repeatedly and reliably exceeded Mach 1.015, which Bombardier says was a big step in enabling the Global 8000’s top speed of Mach 0.94. That flight was when, Bombardier says, its jets became the fastest passenger planes on Earth since the Concorde.
Of course, this thing isn’t just about being a hot rod. The 111-foot-long Global 8000 is one of the largest purpose-built bizjets, and Bombardier is capitalizing on that by saying the cabin has four separate living spaces plus a crew rest area. Price? $78 million.
Normally, I wouldn’t even bother with toys like this. Chances are slim I will ever see one of these up close in real life, let alone fly in one. Most of you won’t, either. But this is one of those times when one of those toys has me smiling. The Global 8000’s spec sheet is insane, and the thought of Bombardier taking a 7500 past Mach 1.0 makes me giggle. It’s all silly and unnecessarily excessive, not unlike the cars from the likes of Koenigsegg, or making your Ford work truck have 700 HP just because you can.
So, I may never see one of these, but I’m happy they exist. I hope some engineers got to have a lot of fun making a silly, quick jet. Who knows what the future holds? Maybe several years from now I’ll be happy to tell you that supersonic transports are back. But for now, the fastest thing in the sky that’s made to carry passengers comes from Canada.
One sad thing about the ongoing reconstruction of Pittsburgh Airport is that it will eliminate the Bombardier (now Alstom) people mover that carried passengers from the land-side to air-side terminals. No matter who you were flying with, when you left PIT, you rode on Bombardier.
Bombardier beetles are able to produce an internal explosion in their abdomen and expel a jet of boiling acid. Neat trick and a fitting name for a jet plane company, but why call a snowmobile company that?
Man, the engines on that thing look huge. Probably thirsty compared to the ones on the HondaJet. Especially at Mach 0.94. But at the HJ’s relatively slow M 0.72, maybe the fuel burn might be similar. I just don’t know.
I flew in a Lear 2X of some sort back in 1994 and was amazed at how tight the cabin was. I was 75 inches/190 cm tall (back then). And I could not stand up straight in the aisle.
As far as helicopter safety goes, I frequently flew (as a news photographer) in two Bell 206 helicopters that each had or got to 12,000 hours+ on their airframes. At the time (I haven’t checked recently), the B-206 held the best safety record of any single-engine aircraft. They are expensive machines and are ordinarily well-maintained. So that helps.
I have a pilot’s license and the pilot of the first 206 I flew in would sometimes let me fly it once we got off the ground. In normal flight, a helicopter is not a whole lot different than the fixed wing planes I was licensed for. Hovering is a bit of an art. (I got a couple of hours of flight instruction in a Robinson R22 and that was the hardest part.) And landing was a whole different set of skills. I could understand what he was doing but never allowed to participate.
When things go sideways, the emergency procedures are very different. Fortunately for me, they never did and the guys I flew with practiced them when nobody was aboard.
The second pilot I flew with flew Chinooks, trained young Army kids how to fly them and went to some Bell extreme situation training in Texas annually. He never let me or anyone else have their hands and feet (it takes all four) on any control. I’m still here, so that was fine.
When I went from San Juan to Vieques and back, I was the only passenger on a tiny prop plane. Like tiny enough where I could open the window for some fresh air. Just me and the pilot, where I had to sit on the right side of the cabin because he was on the left side. It’s was kinda dicey.
That being said, it’s was magnitudes safer feeling than the one time I was in a helicopter. I don’t know how people use them so much. Helicopters are scary as shit.
Love this article, I’m a plane nerd so keep it up!
Old man yelling at cloud here.
If our species survives in the mid-to-long term… not a given…
And if we retain enough technical advancement to retain knowledge of our past… also not a given…
Our descendants are going to look at private jet travel as the most mind-numbingly wasteful and self-destructive activity from our era – an era mostly defined by self-destructive wastefulness.
Yes, there are a million things we can and should be doing for our planet’s future. But banning private jet travel should be an absolute no brainer. It has no downside for 99.999% of the planet’s population and the .001% impacted should, in a just world, be prepping for a date with Mademoiselle Guillotine.
Im sure it’s extremely wasteful on a per-person level, but in the grand scheme of air travel, how many miles are being traveled in private and business jets versus commercial planes? Or how many gallons of fuel burned? If I had to guess, i would say less than 5%. And if we assume that most air travel is unnecessary (tourism), it would probably make more sense to ban commercial flights. Of course that would mean that only the very rich could afford traveling by air, and that would feel unfair. But from an environmental perspective, it would be more effective, a lot more.
I have no problem with the argument that commercial airline travel is largely wasteful and unnecessary. It’s only in the last 100 years or so that it’s been possible for humans to travel across the planet at 500+ MPH and we haven’t even started to grapple with the idea that that ability may in fact be incompatible with the long-term survival of our species.
Private jet travel is just a massive escalation of the problems with airline travel. It’s the end result of massive income inequality and a complete disregard for the future habitability of our planet. There will be a reckoning.
I’m concerned about that big water stain on the floor of the cabin.
For a short period about 20 years back, I was flying on private jets, mostly because I was going to obscure destinations that commercial connections would have taken forever to get to. What blew my mind is if I went with at least 4 colleagues, it was generally cheaper than flying commercial. Even coach.
It was also nice to avoid airport line-ups.
Yeah, about that carpet pattern… At a glance, I’d be concerned that the lavatory had a bit of an issue.
I have some fun experiences with keeping these executive jets in the air and riding on a few.
I used to be the parts/materials guy for an aerospace company’s fleet of experimental test bed aircraft. We had everything from a Boeing 757 to a Cirrus and EVERYTHING in between. They were all essentially flying labs to test our latest technology.
We had two corporate jets in the fleet; a Gulfstream G550 and a Dassault Falcon 900EX. The one that blew my mind was the Gulfstream… for parts prices. The Lav Level sensor (poop level sensor) poopoo’d itself (pun intended) and the price? 36,000usd. I nearly fell out of my chair.
The Gulfstream was the only aircraft I’ve been sick on too! We had just inherited the jet from corporate and we took it out for some touch and go’s to keep the new pilots current. Thing took off like a rocket! When we got to altitude, it was quiet and cushy in the back. Then they took off the autopilot, and we ended up in some turbulence (the aircraft rocked more like a boat). We did some high performance turns and hit the runway to immediately take off near vertically. I was green at this point and had to sit for 8 more (3 pilots, 3 takeoffs and landings). Pretty sure I lost 2” of height that day! Otherwise, it was such a cool airplane.
Just to give an idea of how much fuel is consumed in the 747-200 which is what the President flies in on most flights .
our standard taxi fuel burn was 4000 pounds
Or just shy of 600 gallons.
that was to get all 4 engines going then taxi to the runway.
At idle each engine burned about 200 gallons per hour on the ground,unless we were empty of cargo we always started all four before we started taxiing out.
Empty we would wait a little bit if the anticipated taxi was longer to save a few hundred gallons .
A lot of time we would be at max takeoff weight of 832,000 lbs and would figure in the 4000 lbs so we’d reach the runway at MTOW or slightly under.
Keep in mind the 200 series 747 was old technology and the new planes are more efficient
I previously worked as an engineer at Gulfstream for a few years, and the competition between Bombardier and Gulfstream in this space always gave me Mustang vs Camaro vibes, but was kind of interesting to watch. You mentioned the Gulfstream G650, but Gulfstream’s most direct competitor to the Global 8000 would probably be the G800, which has a top speed of Mach .935.
The engineering on these planes is fascinating, and as cool as this Bombardier is, it’s my (biased) opinion that the larger oval windows of the Gulfstream look a little bit better than the more numerous, smaller, “commercial airliner style” windows on the Global aircraft. I wouldn’t turn down either one if you gave me one though!
My last international flights were longer than usual by several hours. The reason is because the polar route wasn’t possible. I basically flew directly east- west. The flight path of the shorter distance Polar Route would have put the plane directly over Ukraine.
I wonder if that since world conflict has lengthened flight distances, that you will see an increase in speed to try to offset it.
I think the push away from speed has to do with the requirements of these jets.
When I got hired into the nuclear industry, the old salts had story after story of some plant needing a part ASAP and having a crew working at 2AM to get it ready and running to the local airport where the corporate jet was already warming up and waiting for take off.
But the plants got better at planning and working around what to do if they need something fast. I saw a couple times of someone rushing to the airport to hop on a commercial jet to fly to a plant with a critical part in their carry on, but even that became less and less common quickly.
The big thing that changed was the fax machine and Fedex. The plant can’t use a part until they have all the paperwork. In the 80s, that paperwork had to be with the part, but by the 90s, the rush was to get the part to the FedEx office before they left and you worked all night to get the paperwork done and faxed or e-mailed over so the paperwork is there when the part arrived in the morning (I’ve done that several times).
In the last 10-20 years, things have changed again. Plants do a dramatically better job planning work now. They demand to have everything they might possibly need on hand a couple months before the outage. It’s extremely rare that they find that they are missing a part during an outage because of good planning..
What few corporate jets I see are more for Executives to make direct first class flights so they don’t waste an entire day with layovers and connections. With the addition of wi-fi on the plane, an extra hour of flying time isn’t that bad a hit on their productivity too. It’s not like you have a plant watching money flow out of their pockets every second that that part isn’t on site.
My one and only experience in a business jet came in 2003 in a Falcon. The pilots were former fighter pilots and they asked us when we boarded if anyone objected to having some “fun” with the takeoff. None of us objected and it was quite impressive to see how fast that thing took off and would climb. I don’t know much about these types of planes, but that was something I will never forget.
Eat our dust, eh!
This is what my dad sold for the last 10 years of his career until retiring around 2017-18. After a lifetime in general aviation, he made the leap to Learjet and then Challenger/Global, covering most of the mid-Atlantic…basically, if you had a big company and ran out of Teterboro or White Plains or anywhere in the DC area, he probably had your flight department on speed dial.
So while the old man had been a private pilot since his 16th birthday, he never made the move into flying jets — just selling them. That means he got quite a few rides (including hi-po demos) on all of these beasts.
The one big question I always had for him was whether the “class warfare warriors” were correct — are these just toys for the rich and for deep-pocketed companies, or were they valuable ways to connect small towns and cities, nonstop, saving precious time and resources for the executives.
The answer: It started as the latter (especially post-9/11) and then became more of the former. What used to be a way for an executive to travel to a factory or branch for meetings and speeches was replaced by consolidation and technology. So the jet became more of a status symbol. And the boards of directors were all too happy to sign off on this because you didn’t want to be the only ones at the industry meeting on a commercial plane. 2 hours late. With the need for extra personal security along the way (another increasing concern now after United Healthcare).
But it’s still awesome, and the technology in business jet leads the industry. We often think of airlines being the ones pushing the tech boundaries, but more often than not it’s the F1 cars of the sky — they have the margins and deep pockets that Boeing and Airbus normally don’t. Almost anything that makes an airliner safer, faster, or more efficient probably started out on a business jet.
I would love to hear you old man’s stories. Sounds like he has many.
Last year I flew in a Global 7500. Very nice planes. The takeoff acceleration and climb is incredible. Depending on the configuration, they have a couch or bed in the back. No more jet lag. We were cruising at mach 0.85 at 43000 ft
I doubt many of these birds ever spend any significant amount of time going that fast. Going slower both saves a TON of fuel and stretches the range. But if you absolutely positively need to be there ASAP, only the military is going to get you there faster, and a LOT less comfortably. At least until and if Boom can get their bird flying.
The pre -800 747s could do Mach .92, and 727s and 707s/DC-8s could get right up close to M.90 too. Turbojets sucked fuel, but they could go FAST.
The very first airliner to go supersonic intentionally was a DC-8. In a shallow dive, where due to Mach tuck and aerodynamic loading the pilot had to push INTO the dive to unload the stabilizer to pull out of it. I suspect he needed the chase plane to carry his enormous brass balls. At least one 747 significantly broke the sound barrier unintentionally after an upset and lived to tell the tale, albeit after leaving significant bits of the airplane scattered across the Pacific Ocean and the main wing spar bent up a number of inches from the G-forces pulling out of the dive. Eeek.
The efficiency curve gets pretty crazy above 40k’ feet where most of these operate — it looks like while max speed is 0.94, max cruise is 0.92 — not drastically different. Standard cruise is a more normal 0.85
I’m not engineery enough to explain it well, but unlike a car where the optimal efficiency speed is well below the max speed, it’s a lot closer together on bizjets where things are more balanced for high altitude…unlike cars, where almost any speed over 50 takes your efficiency downhill quickly.
It still takes a LOT more fuel to get those last few knots. That is well shown if you look at the range vs. speed charts for all of these birds. And of course, payload factors heavily into it as well. If you want to go far and fast, you aren’t lifting poop off the ground. You can bet that for those record runs it was two skinny pilots and a change of underwear on the bird, with some helium treats for snacks.
They are going to spend most of their time at that same old .85 Mach, and the reality is that going faster doesn’t really save you THAT much time. The real time savings of flying private is on the GROUND, not in the air, both in being able to fly from and to more convenient places and not having to deal with airline terminal nonsense. Having BTDT when a client needed me there *yesterday* and sent the corporate jet to get me – it’s NICE to park in front of the FBO and walk straight out to the airplane, then fly into the little municipal airport right next to the client site rather than the big commercial airport an hour and a half away.
It’s really all just dick-waving. Though of course the things that let this airplane go that fast make it a little more efficient when you aren’t.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with most of that — see my post a little further up about my dad’s take on selling these jets for years. The pragmatic part is about no TSA, short-field capability, and time savings…but in practice it’s more about having nice stuff.
As far as efficiency, I sometimes joke that if we want to get serious about climate change, we’ll go back to pistons and just take it really slow. But people won’t tolerate that discomfort and time commitment.
Bring back the B-36!
No need for pistons, those things were *terrible* in so many ways. But propellers, yes. Turboprops are far more efficient, though I suspect at this point the highest bypass geared turbofans are probably equaling or exceeding them, given how high they can fly vs. propellers. But for sure all the 70 and under seaters really should have props.
Of course if we really cared we would go back to 2-3 flights a day on much, much bigger and more efficient airplanes rather than every two hours on small regional jets. And stop flying completely to tiny airports close to major airports.
Yep, I misspoke, I means props in general and not pistons specifically.
On that last point, another thing that hit my a couple weeks ago on my arbitrary 35-minute flight from ATL to BHM was how airlines could probably run luxury bus services for anything under ~200 miles, and you’d have lower costs, happier passenger, and probably do it even more quickly and flexibly. But the aircraft utilization algorithms would have to be redone from the ground up. I love flying, but when it takes me 4-5 hours (layovers and/or checkin) to do what my car can do in 2 hours, something needs fixing.
American does the bus thing out of Philly, and Continental/ United did/maybe still does out of Newark (haven’t been there in ages) to various NJ/PA locations. For American they do it to Atlantic City and Allentown, IIRC. I think it’s great, though I have never had to do it. Has the advantage of you are checking in and clearing security at a much smaller and quieter airport, and you can check your bags through if you are silly enough to check bags. Disadvantage is it takes longer and you can end up stuck in traffic.
I flew to BHM a couple weeks ago too, LOL, though on American. Needed to go to Douglasville, GA and decided I would rather have an extra hour drive than deal with the madness that is ATL, so I do it occasionally. Nice little airport, though the Holiday Inn right next to it is *tired*. I had a 5:20am flight, so wanted to be right there the last night.
I LIKE long layovers – I have an Admiral’s Club membership (and I am getting paid when I am flying 95% of the time – nothing I like more than being paid to sit on my butt in an airport getting paid). The reason to take the connection over a longer drive and a direct flight is that you usually end up dealing with a MUCH smaller and more convenient airport. And not that I care that much, the direct to hub flight usually costs more. And it’s amusing when your flight is delayed an hour and everyone around you is losing their minds because they are going to miss their connections.
People way over exaggerate the time needed before a flight (unless of course your home airport is somewhere stupid like ATL, in which case I feel sorry for them). My home airports are so small I could get there 15 minutes before boarding and never have a problem, if it weren’t for the potential of traffic dilemmas getting TO the airport. I’ve already checked in and I have PreCheck. I live an hour from either of my two FL home airports (SRQ and RSW), so I have to leave time for the potential of Florida Man getting stupid on I-75 (and it has happened). In the summer when I am flying out of Portland, ME, I routinely get there 20 minutes before boarding – and I do the same for the train to Boston. I only live 10 minutes from both the airport and the train station. Only exception being major holiday weeks, but I very rarely fly those weeks. I am a little annoyed I have to fly this week – the week after Easter is Exodus from God’s Waiting Room, FL – sooooo many wheelchairs and generally doddering old snowbirds flying north. It’s worse than the weeks before Thanksgiving and Christmas. Everything is sold out – though since few business travelers, I always get upgraded easily, LOL.
I think Blue Origin would like a word about that “fastest thing in the sky meant carry passengers” observation.
The choices of origins and destinations with them are just a tad limited.
True, but can imagine Texas to Sydney in about 20 minutes if they’d aim that thing down range. Cost might be an issue, though.
The training requirements are a tad onerous for the average fat cat businessman. So is the risk level.
Yeah, but you know what? I’m willing for them to take those risks.
“I rode on a business jet once, so I’m basically Orville Wright!” –Gayle King
Maybe if she’d built the business jet first.
My cousin owns a private jet charter that runs 2-3 planes at a time. The prices of everything involved are absolutely insane. One part of the business that is crazy is that their primary routes are for trips that go from places like LA or NYC to Dubai or SE Asia, almost all charters were one-way. People with that level of income just call when they need a ride and assume it will be available. So almost all of his prices include all or most of the cost for the return trip. After booking, his company works to find other passengers who want trips that will pay for part or all of the return leg. If they do, they make a killing; if they don’t, they at least break even.
For the people who can be bothered to plan far enough in advance, they can typically work out a deal so the charges aren’t so crazy since they can work ahead to book people on the return leg. He has ended up going around the world multiple times just because the next wealthy passenger available wanted to go in that direction.
It is also interesting that my cousin was born in Europe and learned to fly with his home air force. One reason he gets calls is that lots of wealthy people from other countries don’t want American pilots, especially ex-military pilots.
Why don’t they want American or ex military pilots? Just curious.
US Navy Pilots are trained to – basically – crash land.
US Air Force Pilots probably bombed their country.
They don’t trust them. They figure, with justification, that any American (especially those with military training) would be willing to do whatever the U.S. government asks and the U.S. government is considered the biggest threat to most people across the planet.
Is this the new max impression ride for the coolest kids?
I know Musk, Bezos, Gates, etc ride Gulfstreams currently.
Geez, that interior is just so BLAH looking. Plus it looks like someone spilled a mop bucket down the center 🙁
That’s the dealer-ordered lease special.
You can special order any color you want – but you gotta wait 12 months and pay an extra million dollars or so.
Wanna know a secret? These are normally 3-5 YEARS’ lead time, 100% built to order, and the value of your order can actually climb higher as you approach delivery, since it can be sold to another company who can’t afford to wait.
It’s a crazy business.
The positive thing is that for $78M you can choose literally anything you want.
that is not bucket slop that is super spy blood.
Only when Pussy Galore is the pilot.
Yeah, that carpet is terrible. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to own that in such an expensive purchase.
Your typical customer for these go for the blah.
Source: I worked in the interiors team on the Global 6000 & 7500.