Aviation experts believe that — royal families aside — he is now the owner of the world’s most expensive private jet. While others squeeze into Learjets, his Boeing 767-300 aircraft originally had room for 350 passengers and is half the length of the pitch at Stamford Bridge.
How time flies. Twenty years ago he and his fellow Soviet citizens had to make do with Ilyushin airliners with basic comfort and a bad safety record. His new “toy” is the ultimate in luxury. He has spent at least £10m on equipping the interior alone.
A missile-jamming device, similar to the ones which protect George W Bush aboard Air Force One, cost another £800,000. A “zonal comfort” air-conditioning system imported from Sweden ensures perfect humidity.
Abramovich bought the plane from Ansett, an aircraft leasing company that had planned to sell it to Hawaiian Airlines. He paid £10m more than John Travolta, star of Grease and Pulp Fiction, spent on a Boeing 707 from Qantas Airlines of Australia.
The plane was flown to Filton airfield near Bristol to be painted in Abramovich’s livery. It was then sent to Jet Aviation, an aircraft completion specialist, in Basel, Switzerland, to be customised.
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Abramovich — now likely to see a rival Russian tycoon, Boris Zingarevich, also facing him as a rival Premiership club owner with his bid for Everton — has banned anybody from discussing his new acquisition. Jet Aviation refused to acknowledge that it had ever seen the aircraft but photographs of “a recently completed Boeing 767” have been posted on its website.
Air Abramovich is fitted out with a dining room where he and fellow passengers — up to 30 — can dine by candlelight on food prepared in an adjoining kitchen with gold-plated sinks.
There is an office panelled with marquetry more reminiscent of tsarist palaces than passenger planes. There are Fabergé-style egg-shaped ornaments dotted around the plane. Fresh flowers bedeck a carpeted bedroom with a large double bed. Elsewhere, there are plasma screens to watch in-flight movies.
The expense does not stop there. Aviation economists believe the plane will cost him at least £100 a mile to fly in fuel and other expenses if he has it on 24-hour call and reserved for his personal use. A return trip from Moscow to London would cost £300,000, 1,500 times the cost of the cheapest Aeroflot return fare of £200. But with a personal fortune put at £7.5 billion in The Sunday Times Rich List, making him the richest man in Britain, Abramovich has enough money to fly around the world every day for 17 years.
The airliner has a range of 7,000 miles, can stay in the air for 14 hours and has one of the best safety records. It rather puts to shame the two Ilyushin presidential jets that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, inherited from Boris Yeltsin.
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Only potentates such as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who has a Boeing 747 jumbo jet equipped with a fountain, or the Sultan of Brunei, who travels in a 208ft Airbus 340 costing £95m, travel in more style.
Rainer Albecker, senior vice-president at Jet Aviation, said: “We don’t know who did his plane. I wouldn’t tell you if we did. It is no longer with us.”
The firm’s interior designer, Eric Jan, previously worked on the design of yachts, another of Abramovich’s pet interests. He has three vessels worth a total of more than £200m.
Abramovich has registered his plane in the Netherlands, but it is expected to be based in Moscow or at Anadyr airport in the region of Chukotka, Siberia, where he is governor. He has spent £20m of his own money improving the airfield there.
David Wills, assistant editor of Aviation News, said: “It’s a fabulous piece of kit for one man. It is extremely unusual to have such a large airliner as a private jet. The original seats will have been ripped out and the plane equipped with luxury baths and the like, but I don’t think there is enough room for a football pitch.”
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Additional reporting: Anna Mikhailova