[SML] elite production?

Alex French flaggday at gmail.com
Thu Oct 2 14:12:40 UTC 2014


On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Alex French <flaggday at gmail.com> wrote:
> But going down that road, I bet we'd quickly find that this $100K
> pales in comparison to the other costs associated with that 18 minutes
> worth of speech.  And that this speech probably wasn't particularly
> expensive in comparison to the support costs around POTUS on any
> average day (I have no specific citations to support that, but would
> be interested if anyone else does).

Replying to myself...

Very quick Googling suggests that Air Force One costs somewhere north
of $250K to operate "per hour".  No obvious definitive answers about
many questions might ask (is that including costs that would be
incurred if POTUS wasn't on Air Force One?  is that including costs of
things that are physically outside the airplane, like having other
aircraft standing by for an emergency?  does "per hour" mean flight
time, or time POTUS is on the plane, or something else?  How much does
that include costs that would be incurred just by Air Force One being
ready even if it was never used?)

I usually fly for more like $50/hour.  And the biggest speeches I make
are usually when I pontificate at the bar... production costs are
maybe $15/hr to pay for a steady stream of beer...

That wasn't really going anywhere, but we got back to beer.

Alex French




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