Kylie Jenner doesn’t suffer from congestion. The influencer and businesswoman takes her private plane or that of her boyfriend, rapper Travis Scott, for 12-minute trips. That emerges from the recent controversy involving the youngest of the Kardashian clan, who is hugely popular around the world for her reality show The Kardashians. In the show’s 20 aired seasons (and counting), these five sisters — Kourtney, Khloé, Kim, Kendall, and Kylie — have proven that extreme luxury and opulence can be the best shows. But everything has a limit, and Kylie Jenner’s latest post seems to have crossed it.
“Do you want to take yours or mine?” he asked on his Instagram profile, which is the second most followed in the world with more than 300 million followers (only behind Cristiano Ronaldo). Jenner accompanied the question with a photo in which she hugged her partner and was surrounded by two private jets. The businesswoman, who built her fortune thanks in part to a vegan cosmetics line, often travels in her own plane.
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This contradiction has drawn her fans’ wrath on other occasions, but this latest post, amassing 42,000 comments, has upped the criticism. “Kylie Jenner is choosing what color her private jet she wants today while I have to swallow my iced coffee before my straw turns to papier-mâché?” summarized one anonymous user in a tweet that racked up 25,000 likes. “It breaks my mind that Kylie Jenner and her boyfriend can choose which private jet they fly to California and let us, poor, recycling lemonade toppers, take care of the world,” quipped another.
Far from escalating, the controversy gained new momentum when a tweet went out the Celebrity Jets account, which monitors the movements of celebrities’ private planes. It was then learned that they ended up taking Kylies. And that they had chosen Travis the day before. But the juicy piece of information wasn’t that, it was that the journey they were making back then, from Van Nuys, California, to Camarillo in the same state, took 12 minutes total, counting landing and takeoff. The same distance can be covered by car in about 40 minutes, according to Google Maps.
Celebrity Jets is an automated account, a bot that publishes the flights of various celebrities in real time, using the public information that these devices are required to provide for security reasons. Thanks to this profile, it’s also known that Kylie’s older sister, Kim Kardashian, took a 15-minute flight on her plane last week. On this trip, it consumed 442 liters of fuel and emitted a ton of carbon dioxide. It was also made public that rapper Drake does not stop in southern Europe either. He traveled in his jet from Barcelona to Ibiza (emitting 11 tons of CO₂), from Ibiza to Nice (22 tons) and from Nice to Barcelona (16 tons) in just one week. According to Celebrity Jets, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Jay Z, Mark Wahlberg or Taylor Swift are some of the celebs who have also opted for this mode of transportation in the last month.
Private planes pollute 10 times more than commercial planes and 50 times more than trains. A report by the Transport&Environment group, of which Ecologistas en Acción is a shareholder, assures that its emissions in Europe have skyrocketed by 31% over the last 15 years. According to this group, the emissions from a jet on a four-hour journey are “equivalent to the total emissions caused by the average person per year.”
That was one of the reasons that led 19-year-old programmer Jack Sweeney to create the Celebrity Jets account. The young man has spoken out on Twitter about the controversy raised with Kylie Jenner’s short flight. Preferring not to pinch his fingers, he suggests that this small trip could consist of parking the device after leaving the influencer at an airfield closer to where he lives. There’s no way of knowing, and in any case, many Jenner flights last between 20 and 30 minutes. Maybe that’s why Sweeney sympathizes with social anger. “I can understand why people go after them when they post photos and show jets,” he said on Twitter.
This planner doesn’t just monitor celebrity flights. He has another account tracking the flights of Air Force One – the US presidential plane – another for Putin and the Russian magnates (recently visiting non-aligned countries like Iran) and another for Elon Musk. Tesla’s owner tried to close the account with a checkbook, though his offer to become the richest man in the world wasn’t particularly generous: he offered him $5,000. Sweeney haggled and the thing fizzled out. The tycoon, who fights for freedom on Twitter, blocked the young programmer on the same social network and, in the eyes of the world, continued to travel on his private plane. For now, it’s broken and undergoing a lengthy overhaul in California, not far from Kylie Jenner’s.