A friend sent me a CNN article regarding Anne Dias Griffin’s attempt to get $12 million per year in child support for three children under the age of 10. Part of the reason that she can’t make ends meet on the $50 million that she already has in the bank (most of that is proceeds from her 10-year marriage to rich guy Ken Griffin, under a prenuptial agreement that she is challenging in an attempt to get more) is that she wants to spend $3.6 million per year on jet charter.
I emailed a friend who owns a jet charter business to ask what kind of plane would be sensible for a Chicago resident with three children going to New York, California, etc., and how much it would cost. Here’s his answer:
Lear 60 or Hawker at $3,500 per hour at most.
… when the alimony doesn’t work pack it all into child support.
Let’s back out the numbers then. Ms. Griffin wants her preschool-age children to fly roughly 1000 hours per year, the same number as the FAA maximum for a full-time airline pilot (see FAR 121.471: “No certificate holder conducting domestic operations may schedule any flight crewmember and no flight crewmember may accept an assignment for flight time in scheduled air transportation or in other commercial flying if that crewmember’s total flight time in all commercial flying will exceed— (1) 1,000 hours in any calendar year;”).
How far can one go in an 8-passenger Lear 60 in 1000 hours? The plane cruises at roughly 500 miles per hour. The children would thus be flying close to 500,000 miles every year, equivalent to circling the Earth at the Equator almost 21 times.
You might ask how far Ms. Dias Griffin could go in a jet-powered plane with only 4 passenger seats plus two up front for the pilots. That would be something like a Piper Meridian turboprop or perhaps the forthcoming Cirrus Jet (thanks to the miracle of Chinese ownership, the personal jet is now slated for certification and delivery in the “fourth quarter” of 2015 (i.e., December 31 at 11:59 pm)). With $3.6 million, she could buy a new one roughly every 6 months. At $1000 per hour to charter, she and the children could fly 3,600 hours per year at roughly 300 miles per hour, more than 1 million statute miles.
What if she earned a pilot certificate during the time that the four nannies are taking care of the children? (she does not seem to have a job) She could then fly the children herself in a Cirrus SR22 at a cost of roughly $250/hour (flight school rental block rate, including fuel). The $3.6 million would then cover 14,400 hours per year of flying time. As there are only 8760 hours in a year, Ms. Dias Griffin would be able to fly up to 1.75 million miles each year with her three children in the SR22 and have $1.5 million left over to pay for sundries. As the SR22 can seat five, assuming at least one occupant is a child, she could take along an instructor for two-pilot safety.
Related:
- report from airplane convention where a woman described how she purchased a $700,000 Cirrus SR22 using child support cash
Her kids are pretty young, so I believe she would want an aircraft large enough that at flight altitude, the kids can play ball in the aisle, do the crazy sort of rough and tumble things kids do, maybe have a kid friendly kitchen and playroom, a ball pit, cotton candy machine, doll house, train set, you know that sort of thing.
A Boeing Business Jet is probably overkill for that, but I assume that’s more in the best interests of the children than a Lear runabout.
“(thanks to the miracle of Chinese ownership, the personal jet is now slated for certification and delivery in the “fourth quarter” of 2015 (i.e., December 31 at 11:59 pm)).”
I believe the Chinese backers are now hitting state up for $16 million to finish the jet.
I was kinder to the mom and assumed that she was keeping the children in place a lot of the time and flying IN tutors and stationery designers. (She has $2,000 a month budgeted for stationery, I assume that means several redesigns each year for each child. I don’t know HOW you could do that with only local Chicago talent. You’d probably need someone from Miami.)
I trust CNN as much as I would trust Pravda.
According to the article, this is not her request but an attempt at reconstructing how much the HUSBAND was spending while they were still married:
“The only thing Anne has done is to state what Ken’s historic spending was for their children during the marriage and what it would cost to replicate that, as required by Illinois law.”
This I assume has to do with the law in some states that children should continue to be provided for “in the manner to which they are accustomed” – that a divorce, which is not their fault, should not result in a reduction in their lifestyle.
So the real question is how did it happen that we now have people in America who live like Oriental potentates, while others count themselves lucky to get 25 hrs/ week at minimum wage at Walmart? Why do we no longer even PRETEND to be an egalitarian society?
Jerry: Some other articles on this particular mother have said that the father, as is typical for children with a high cash value, is paying all of the children’s actual expenses (e.g., the nannies, any private school tuition, health insurance and medical, etc.) directly. So the mother need not spend any of the child support on the children per se. If she spent all $12 million times 16 years (I think the youngest child is two years old) on private air transportation that would be $192 million. If she needed to operate a more typical-for-a-private-owner 150 hours per year she could do what Sergey and Larry did over at Google, i.e., buy a used Boeing 767 from an airline, retrofit the interior for personal enjoyment (sofas, bathtub, etc.), and then hire a full-time crew of three (pilots plus flight attendant) to run it. Larry and Sergey reportedly paid only about $25 million for the B767 so she would still have a lot of change left from the 192 million dollar bill.
“They bought the jet back in September, 2005 for around $ 15 million from Qantas.”
But I believe they spent quite a bit on the retrofit. Embarrassing quote that slipped out of the design meeting was Mr. Brin’s: “It’s a party plane! It’s a party plane!”