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Google is reportedly expanding the fleet of private jets that has privileges to take off from a small, Nasa-operated airfield near the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. As part of an agreement with the space agency, the company’s top executives can already drive the mere four miles up the road to Moffett Field, which is generally closed to private aircraft, and board any of the three jets that they keep there. Now Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s billionaire founders, are adding a fourth aircraft to the fleet which, for $1.3 million a year, they park at the airfield in return for assisting Nasa with its information-gathering activities.
The plane that will join the Boeing 767-200 and two Gulfstream Vs already in Google’s hangar is, according to the New York Times, a Boeing 757, which is large by corporate jet standards. Google, whose offices are a seven-minute drive from the airfield, already has a broad research agreement with Nasa, and in August, the agency’s scientists used one of the company’s planes to observe a meteor shower. Local residents expressed opposition to the idea that Nasa open up its runways as a means of helping pay for facilities. “The Google flights represent the possibility that the camel’s nose is under the tent,” one was quoted as saying when news of the agreement broke last month. Damn, I would so use a private jet too!
Source: NY Times, Times
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