Rich people are using their private jets like taxis

Rich people have places to be, like the rest of us, but they don’t get there like the rest of us. They increasingly depend on private jet travel to get around — even for short distances — and a recent article in the academic journal Communications Earth & Environment says this has negative implications for the rest of the population.

“Flight pattern analysis confirms extensive travel for leisure purposes, and for cultural and political events,” write researchers Stefan Gössling, Andreas Humpe, and Jorge Cardoso Leitão. “Emissions increased by 46% between 2019-2023, with industry expectations of continued strong growth.” That’s 15.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about 2% of all global aviation emissions — an outsized impact for such a vanishingly small portion of all flights.

The report, “Private aviation is making a growing contribution to climate change,” notes that half of those flights are shorter than 500km. That’s about 310 miles, or the distance between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One in 20 of them are shorter than 50km, or the distance from Brooklyn, New York to New Haven, Connecticut.

Why not just fly commercial or travel by a less carbon-intensive method? The scientists say that their “findings also confirm that PA are used routinely, and in many instances appear to replace cars for time gains or convenience.” In some cases that time-is-money calculation is given for figures like Taylor Swift, whose hectic schedules take them to a lot of places in not a lot of time.

And during the early years of the COVID-19, flying private became a more common socially distanced way to travel. (In 2020 flight distances shrank and the number of flights increased.) But sometimes the wealthy treat private jets like taxis because they can. Ricky Sitomer, CEO of private jet charter service StarJets, explained the calculus this way at a recent investment conference:

In the late 1990s I owned a stock brokerage firm, and I used a helicopter every Thursday night out to the Hamptons and then helicoptered back every Monday morning. And then, my guys would not show up to work on Fridays. So, to encourage them to come to work, I say if you work to the close, we’ll have a helicopter for everybody to fly to the Hamptons on Friday night. So, I had a bunch of helicopters flying back and forth on Fridays for my sales guys, and that evolved into private jets, top guys going to Vegas or other destinations.

What is supposed to be done? The paper’s authors say that, as private flying becomes “increasingly important as a source of emissions in relative (share of global emissions) and absolute terms (sector’s total emissions)…it will be necessary to regulate the sector.”