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hanscom field
200 Private Jet Owners Burned as Much CO2 as 40,000 Brits
The planes tracked by a new Guardian report belong to celebrities, billionaires, CEOs, and their families, among them the Murdoch family, Taylor Swift, and the Rolling Stones.
Nov 21, 2023
The private jets of just 200 rich and famous individuals or groups released around 415,518 metric tons of climate-heating carbon dioxide between January 2022 and September 22, 2023, The Guardian revealed Tuesday.
That's equal to the emissions burned by nearly 40,000 British residents in all aspects of their lives, the newspaper calculated.
The planes tracked by the outlet belong to celebrities, billionaires, CEOs, and their families, among them the Murdoch family, Taylor Swift, and the Rolling Stones. All told, the high-flyers made a total of 44,739 trips during the study period for a combined 11 years in the air.
"Pollution for wasteful luxury has to be the first to go, we need a ban on private jets."
Notable emitters included the Blavatnik family, the Murdoch family, and Eric Schmidt, whose flights during the 21-month study period released more than 7,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The Sawiris family emitted around 7,500 metric tons, and Lorenzo Fertitta more than 5,000.
The Rolling Stones' Boeing 767 wide-body aircraft released around 5,046 metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is equal to 1,763 economy flights from London to New York. The 39 jets owned by 30 Russian oligarchs released 30,701 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
For comparison, average per capita emissions were 14.44 metric tons in the U.S. for 2022, 13.52 metric tons in Russia in 2021, and 5.2 metric tons in the U.K. the same year.
Taylor Swift was the only celebrity or billionaire in the report whose team responded to a request for comment.
"Before the tour kicked off in March of 2023, Taylor bought more than double the carbon credits needed to offset all tour travel," a spokesperson for the pop star told The Guardian.
Swift appears to have responded to public pressure to reduce private jet use. Her plane averaged 19 flights a month between January and August 2022, when she received criticism after sustainability firm Yard named her the celebrity who used her plane the most. After that point, the plane's average monthly flights dropped to two.
The Guardian's investigation was based on private aircraft registrations compiled by TheAirTraffic Database and flight records from OpenSky. Reporters calculated flight emissions based on model information found in the ADSBExchange Aircraft database and Planespotters.net and emissions per hour per model found in the Conklin & De Decker's CO2 calculator and the Eurocontrol emission calculator.
The report was released the day after an Oxfam study found that the world's richest 1% emitted the same amount as its poorest two-thirds. Given their high carbon footprint and luxury status, private jets have emerged as a rallying point for the climate justice movement.
"It's hugely unfair that rich people can wreck the climate this way, in just one flight polluting more than driving a car 23,000 kilometers," Greenpeace E.U. transport campaigner Thomas Gelin said in March. "Pollution for wasteful luxury has to be the first to go, we need a ban on private jets."
In the U.S., a group of climate campaigners is mobilizing to stop the expansion of Massachusetts' Hanscom Field, the largest private jet field in New England. An October report found that flights from that field between January 1, 2022, and July 15, 2023, released a total of 106,676 tons of carbon emissions.
"While plenty of business is no doubt discussed over golf at Aberdeen, Scotland, or at bird hunting reserves in Argentina (destinations we also documented), this is probably the least defensible form of luxury travel on a warming planet when a Zoom call would often do," Chuck Collins, who co-authored the Hanscom report, wrote for Fortune on November 14.
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New England Climate Activists Press for No New Private Jet Infrastructure
There is a local battle over airport expansion with global implications on climate and inequality.
Oct 07, 2023
A coalition of northeast climate justice activists is vigorously opposing the expansion of airport facilities for private jets.
Hanscom Field, located 14 miles from Boston, is the largest private jet airport in New England. A group of private developers, led by venture capitalist Jeffrey Leerink, a former executive of now-collapsed Silicon Valley Bank, has proposed a massive expansion project to triple Hanscom’s capacity to serve private jets.
New England climate activists are pushing back, calling for “no private jet expansion at Hanscom or anywhere.” In the global struggle to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure, the effort to stop new private jet infrastructure is a potentially winnable first step. And it is a demand rooted in climate justice, as the ultra-wealthy of the Northern hemisphere are the largest carbon polluters.
This week, the Institute for Policy Studies released a report, Hanscom High Flyers, analyzing private jet activity at Hanscom Field since the beginning of 2021. The report, which I co-authored, found that an estimated half of private jet flights out of Hanscom fly to luxury and recreation destinations, many less than an hour from Boston. These include Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, and many international destinations such as Barcelona, Spain, and Caribbean islands, Aruba, Bahamas, and Tortola.
Should we set off a carbon bomb of emissions so the wealthiest people on the planet can private jet from Boston to Nantucket or Aruba?
The report analyzed 31,599 private jet flights over an eighteen-month period between January 1, 2022 and July 15, 2023. We found over 2,915 different private jets took off and landed at Hanscom field, traveling to or from 761 unique destinations. Over this period, Hanscom private jets accounted for an estimated 106,676 tons of carbon emissions. For comparison, the average Massachusetts resident emits roughly eight tons a year for every activity—travel, food, buildings, and their share of public infrastructure (globally the average is less than four tons).
The report greatly underestimates the impact of private jet travel at Hanscom because private jet owners can request that the FAA remove their flight tracking data from public registries. Four Boston area billionaires that own private jets—New England Patriot’s owner Robert Kraft, New Balance’s Jim Davis, Red Sox owner John Henry, and Reebok’s Paul Fireman—have all requested their travel data be secret.
The report has struck a nerve, with a front-page Boston Globe story, “Billionaires are responsible for large amounts of climate pollution from Hanscom, a new report finds.”
Among jets with public tracking information, the 20 most frequent Hanscom private jet flyers field took 3,240 flights, both arrivals and departures. These 20 aircraft accounted for over 10% of all Hanscom private jet flights during the 18 months we studied and 14% of total emissions. These 20 frequent flyers burned an estimated 14,930 tons of carbon emissions during this period. Among the top twenty were billionaires John Fish, CEO of Suffolk Construction ($1.2 billion) and Arthur S. Demoulas ($1.3 billion), heir to the Market Basket supermarket chain.
Seven of the top 20 Hanscom users are jets owned by private equity firms based in the Boston area. Charlesbank Partners owns three of the twenty frequent flying jets, with a combined 676 flights emitting an estimated 2,701 tons of carbon. The number one frequent Hanscom flyer, a jet owned by Charlesbank Partners, took a whopping 387 flights in an 18-month period, including 112 flights to and from Nantucket. All three jets made a combined 159 flights to and from Teterboro airport outside New York City, a destination with many other excellent transportation alternatives. Not only is Charlesbank the number one Hanscom jet carbon polluter, they are also a major investor in fossil fuel projects, including a $220 million acquisition of Crosstex Energy, a major natural gas operation in the Southwest, as well as companies involved in gas pipeline services in the Canadian “tar sands.”
The report calls on state regulators and Massport, the public agency that owns Hanscom Field, to reject private jet expansion at Hanscom and any other airports under their control. It also advocates making private jet travelers pay the real environmental and economic cost of their indefensible form of luxury travel.
IPS released a report in May that exposes how private jet travel costs commercial traveler’s money and exacerbates the climate crisis. "High Flyers 2023" found that private aviation made up approximately 1 out of every 6 flights, about 16 percent, handled by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), but contribute just 2 percent of the taxes and fees that make up the trust fund that primarily funds the FAA. Private jets also emit at least 10 to 20 times more pollutants than commercial planes per passenger. The average private jet owner has a median wealth of $190 million, according to Wealth-X.
Tripling the private jet capacity of Hanscom field would be the equivalent of blowing off a ‘carbon bomb’ of emissions to enable a handful of multi-millionaires and billionaires to jet to Aspen, West Palm Beach, Jackson Hole, and New England coastal islands.
After a summer of disruptive weather events supercharged by climate change, activists across New England are mounting weekly protests, “No private jet expansion at Hanscom—or anywhere!”
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Heir Pollution Puts Our Climate in Peril
Wealthy heirs and heiresses disproportionately burn up our planet through their private aircraft activity.
Oct 06, 2023
On January 8, 2022, a Bombardier Challenger 300 departed from Laurence G. Hanscom Field—a general aviation airport a few miles northwest of Boston, Massachusetts—to the beautiful Caribbean Island of Sint Maarten.
The flight lasted three and a half hours. Its jets emitted approximately 10 metric tons of CO2—two tons more than the average annual carbon footprint of a Massachusetts resident.
The owner of the Bombardier Challenger? Billionaire heir Bernard Saul II.
Three generations of Sauls created his high-flying fortune: Both his great-grandfather and grandfather, John Hennessey and Bernard I, got rich in the 19th century and stayed rich. Saul II greatly benefited from his lineage and inherited his grandfather’s property management firm in 1957. More than 60 years later, Saul II is one of the richest men in the world. Forbes estimates his net worth to be around a cool $2.5 billion.
The constituency served by the expansion of private jet space at Hanscom Field is a small minority of ultra-high net worth individuals and their affluent heirs.
In billionaire fashion, Saul II is an active player in the business aviation market: He bears an ownership stake in four different private jets.
This is hardly surprising. Private aircraft owners tend to be a class of ultra-wealthy individuals with a median net worth of at least $140 million. But Saul II’s flight activity—or, more accurately, the flight activity of the jets that he owns—from Hanscom Field symbolizes a trend that’s flown largely under the radar: A phenomenon we like to call “heir pollution.”
Many researchers have exposed the political influence of inherited-wealth dynasties, the strategies they deploy to protect their assets from taxation, and their continued exploitation of the philanthropic sector for their own benefit. But few have captured how wealthy heirs and heiresses disproportionately burn up our planet through their private aircraft activity.
Our analysis of Wealth-X’s database reveals that there are approximately 760 high net worth individuals in the United States who, thanks to their inherited wealth, have an ownership stake in at least one private jet.
Thirty-three of these inheritors are native to, reside in, or own a second home in the state of Massachusetts—11 of them have made use of Hanscom Field since 2022 began.
Our Hanscom High Flyers report takes a comprehensive look at the flight activity of those who fly private from Hanscom Field, profiling the 20 most frequent high flyers over an 18-month period.
Two spots in the top 20 are occupied by two Massachusetts heirs, John Fish and Arthur S. Demoulas. Both are billionaires and, between them, they burned more than 3,000 tons of CO2 just by flying in and out of Hanscom.
The carbon footprint of the other 11 Bay Staters with dynastic wealth is approximately 1,964 metric tons, bringing heir pollution at Hanscom to an estimated 5,035 metric tons. This estimate does not even include the carbon footprint of non-Massachusetts heirs.
Heir pollution isn’t easily tracked. Some children of magnates prefer to outsource their jet travel, founding and relying on air charter businesses. A prime example is the late Paul David Phelan, who was born into a wealthy Canadian family and later founded the successful Chartright Air Group in the 1980s. Chartright is currently the second largest air charter business in Canada and owns a large, diverse fleet. Eight of its business jets have carried out operations at Hanscom, bringing their total carbon footprint at the airport to 476 metric tons.
The Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) wants to expand hangar capacity at Hanscom. Yet understandably, a coalition of local advocacy groups vehemently opposes Massport’s plan: Fueling this hotbed of heir pollution, these concerned citizens recognize, is facilitating climate disaster.
Curiously, Massport asserts that expanding hangar capacity will actually lessen the airport’s carbon footprint. More space, Massport argues, would eliminate their frequent ferry flights, which transport empty planes to other airports for storage purposes. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case. Hanger expansion is much more likely to encourage owners and jet card holders to fly more, intensifying private jet air traffic and worsening climate effects. Think of it like highway expansion, which has a track record of increasing automobile traffic instead of relieving road congestion.
The constituency served by the expansion of private jet space at Hanscom Field is a small minority of ultra-high net worth individuals and their affluent heirs. The dynastically wealthy are flying more than ever. They will continue to do so at our own climate peril—unless we fight against private jet expansion and, through struggle, mobilize for a green energy future.
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