The private plane, which costs more than 400 million dollars, only made test flights and that of its delivery. Its owner has never been in it.
It’s an amazing story, told by CNN. A Boeing 747-8 in VIP private jet configuration, estimated at more than $400 million, has been sleeping since April 2022 at the aircraft graveyard in Pinal Park, Arizona, where some of its parts are recycled. The four-jet engine, which could have been used to transport members of the Saudi royal family, has only been used 16 times in its short life. He has less than 30 flight hours on the clock, and has spent a decade screwed to the tarmac at Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg international airport, in the far east of France.
The private jet, among the most expensive in the world, was purchased by the Saudi royal family for the travel of Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdelaziz Al Saud. But the son of King Abdelaziz succumbed to the disease at 83, a few months before the delivery of the device. Died on October 22, 2011, his plane will finally be delivered only in June 2012. Since then, the plane has been stored at the international airport between Switzerland, Germany and France, for nearly ten years, says the American media.
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An aeronautics expert told CNN that it was parked in this Franco-Swiss airport to be fitted out according to the wishes of its owner. When a State or a royal family acquires this type of business jet, they are delivered by Boeing without any interior fittings. It is up to the customer to have them carried out by specialized companies, some of which are located near the runways of Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg international airport. The bill can be salty, between 30 and 50 million dollars, according to the expert quoted by CNN.
The royal family did try to resell its Boeing 747, which was never fitted out, by selling off the price considerably, but nothing worked: no buyer ready to pay the 95 million dollars claimed in 2017 for this “queen of the airdid not manifest. In April 2022, the plane finally returned to Arizona, in order to be stripped.
Very few copies of this plane, which has a cabin of nearly 500 square meters, have been sold by Boeing. “Ten were built in total, and this is the first to be withdrawn from service“Notes the expert interviewed by CNN. Beyond this model – the last imagined by Boeing in the 747 series – the American aircraft manufacturer’s four-engine engine has not met with commercial success. Production was also interrupted after the last 747 took off from the factories at the end of January 2023.
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