When the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots take their first road trip later this month, players like quarterback Tom Brady will be setting the standard for comfort and legroom on the team’s new private widebody jet.
Moreover, by simply changing from a commercial charter to their own private plane, the NFL franchise also will be skirting a significant portion of the taxes and fees that pay for the U.S. aviation system.
It’s not just sports teams. Operators of the gleaming private jets that have become a symbol of wealth and success pay far less in taxes than airline passengers and other commercial flyers, according to a Bloomberg News analysis and government reports.
On a per flight basis, a private jet could generate as little as two percent of the taxes and fees paid by airline passengers on an identical route, Bloomberg found in its review. High-performance private planes make up about 10 percent of U.S. flights under air-traffic control, yet pay less than 1 percent into a trust fund that finances air-traffic control and other Federal Aviation Administration operations, an agency study found this year.
"By and large, a private aircraft costs the same for the FAA to process as a large aircraft," said Michael Ball, senior associate dean at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of business and co-director of an aviation research consortium. "If you look at it from that standpoint, they clearly aren’t paying their due.”
Unlike most of the rest of the world, which charges fees based on aircraft weight and distance flown, the taxes private jets in the U.S. pay are different from the ones imposed on airlines.
Private aircraft operators pay 21.8 cents per gallon of jet fuel. By contrast, airlines and charter operators have three separate taxes: an excise tax of 7.5 percent on tickets or charter charges, a fee of $4.10 per passenger and 4.3 cents per gallon of jet fuel.
The result is that airline passengers are subsidizing some of the world’s largest corporations and wealthiest people under the current system, said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
"Pretty clearly, we all feel the pain every time we buy an airline ticket and see how big a share of the costs those fees are," Gardner said.
Bloomberg calculated the difference between airline and private-jet taxes on 10 domestic routes, ranging from 2,500 to 340 miles on a variety of typical aircraft. While the taxes can vary significantly due to many factors, there were sharp disparities in all of the examples. On average, private flights generated only about 7 percent of comparable airline taxes in the examples.