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And Finally Artist News
Drake defends eighteen minute private jet flight by insisting that no one was on the plane
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 29 July 2022
Drake has responded to claims that he and other celebrities have been taking super short flights on their private jets, rather than taking a form of travel that produces fewer CO2 emissions. His defence? It’s alright, his plane may have taken a super short flight recently, but he wasn’t on it. In fact there were no passengers on it at all. So that’s alright then.
A recent round of angry shouting about celebs taking brief private jet trips was prompted by Kylie Jenner last week, when she posted a picture of herself and boyfriend Travis Scott standing between two private jets, with the caption “you wanna take mine or yours?”
People then dug up a post from automated Twitter account CelebJets from a week earlier, which showed that Jenner’s plane had taken a flight lasting just seventeen minutes. Which seemed irresponsible, given the environmental impact the flight would have had, and the presumed other more eco-friendly options available for what was clearly a relatively short journey.
From there, The Guardian started digging through the plane tracking account and uncovering other very short flights apparently taken by famous people. And, according to its analysis, the worst offender, in terms of emissions, was Drake. In recent weeks, his plane flew from Hamilton to Toronto in Canada, with a total flight time of eighteen minutes. In the process, it is estimated that the jet spewed out five tonnes of CO2, more than the average annual global emissions of one person.
Responding to those reports, this week Drake defended himself. After Instagram account RealTorontoNewz posted about the controversy, asking followers to chime in, the rapper himself commented: “This is just them moving planes to whatever airport they are being stored at for anyone who was interested in the logistics… nobody takes that flight”.
How he thought people were going to think that was better is anyone’s guess. Sure, yes, maybe the flight was caused by some routine airport logistics that are out of his control. He flew somewhere, then he went somewhere else by some other means of transport, and the plane was not in its nice, comfy plane house. What are you going to do?
Well, I suppose you could recognise that owning a private jet is entirely unnecessary. You know you can hire these things out when you need them? And maybe then another client of the plane company could use the return trip. Or you could just not use private jets. After all, there are always other – sometimes marginally slower – possibilities available. Or you could just not go anywhere at all. Who really needs to go anywhere? Everything’s online now anyway.
But, yeah, if Drake thinks that a good defence for being responsible for pumping out more emissions in less than 20 minutes than most people manage in a year just because your plane ended up in slightly the wrong place, well, it seems unlikely that this controversy is going to go away any time soon.
