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Diving Into Bloomberg's Flight Records
By
Garth Johnston
Published Feb 14, 2011
Modified Feb 14, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Feb 14, 2011
Modified Feb 14, 2011
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We all already knew our minuscule mayor has a travel bug—and we would too if we had houses in Bermuda, Boston, London, New York and Vail! Its the fact that he doesn't like to tell us when and where he is going that makes us fret (we worry!). Claiming his privacy, Bloomberg refuses to admit when he leaves town (witness his Christmas trip to Bermuda) but that doesn't mean he doesn't leave clues&mdahs;it isn't like the man flies coach. Today, the Wall Street Journal makes some educated guesses about hizzoner's whereabouts by studying the flight logs for Bloomberg LP's fleet of private planes.
Of course Bloomberg the man is not the only person with access to those planes, but where they've been going does provide some interesting insights.
Between 2007 and 2010 the fleet flew to Bermuda 54 times, 16 of them last year, and on 41 of those trips an aircraft left New York and spent all or part of the weekend in Bermuda (one of those weekends just happened to be last Christmas when Bloomberg's plane was the last small plane to land at LaGuardia during the blizzard). At least of six of those trips, however, could not have been for the mayor since he was at public events elsewhere.
Other frequent destinations that the paper suspects were Bloomberg's include West Palm Beach (where his daughter Georgina rides horses) which saw another 50 flights between 2007 and 2010. It also flew a lot to London, Boston, Washington and Charleston, but those trips could easily have been for Mike or someone else.
As you can imagine, the mayor's office wasn't really interested in discussing any of this, so the Journal took the story in a different angle. See, back in 2008 Bloomie made a bit of a fuss about air traffic congestion at LaGuardia: "The largest culprit of delays today is the over-scheduling of small airplanes by airlines," he wrote to the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. And yet between August 2008 and the end of 2010 Bloomberg Services aircraft departed or landed 853 times, making it the largest single user of "slots" for general aviation at the airport.
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