#Fakejet in Moscow
You may have heard about the G650 parked in Moscow that Instagrammers hire for photos. But you need to be careful about whom you trust.
ONE OF THE MOST watched documentaries on Netflix at the moment is about the failed luxury music Fyre Festival. The festival was launched by various influencers of Instagram, the social media service, and – because of this innovative marketing – sold out in hours. Unfortunately, the actual event did not live up to the hype. The event was a disaster and the founder is now in jail for fraud, for six years.
At the end of the documentary, a journalist describes how Instagram is so important. She illustrates this by saying how Russians are hiring a parked Gulfstream G650 purely to take photos for Instagram. It is a great story and has been covered by hundreds of publications and TV programmes. The first stories emerged in 2017, but other sites have covered it this year. All tell the same story.
The Telegraph
The Telegraph
Business Insider
Teen Vogue
Unfortunately, it is rubbish.
There is no aircraft parked waiting for Instagrammers. And the photos clearly show it is not a G650 (just look at the windows). The maths does not work. Renting out a $70 million business jet at $170 an hour is not great business. At that rate, it would take 47 years to pay off the aircraft (provided that you never had an empty hour, that the airport let you park it for free, that you paid cash so did not have interest charges, and that you had no staff costs).
As the name suggests, Private Jet Studio is a mocked-up aircraft in a studio, on an industrial estate in Moscow. The interior appears to be a hybrid of several aircraft models. And the vast majority of photographs on Private Jet Studio’s Instagram page are collected from other sources on the web (one was the cover for a 2010 Hawker Beechcraft magazine).
There is a lot of irony here. Journalists writing about Instagrammers using a parked G650 to create fake photos, are actually writing fake news.
Welcome to 2019.
Top: Conor Mcgregor Bottom: Lance Stroll
