A thousand-ton carbon day, and SpaceX’s shuttle gears up for another Texas run

The number that sticks first is 1,064.2 tonnes of CO₂—equivalent to driving a passenger car 2.6 million miles, all in a single Tuesday. Across the board, 395 flights closed, 111,855 miles flown, 254.6 hours airborne. The top mover by volume was SpaceX, whose Boeing 737-800 N154TS and supporting Gulfstreams logged 53 flights and 26.2 hours—more than a tenth of the system-wide total. The same company also took the biggest single carbon hit: 201.0 tonnes, nearly a fifth of yesterday’s entire footprint, thanks largely to high-frequency shuttles between Hawthorne and Brownsville. The destination that saw the most wheels-down was Los Angeles International (KLAX), with 43 arrivals. Southern California remains the gravitational center of the celebrity jet world, pulling in everything from tech CEOs to oil executives.

The longest leg belonged to an aircraft that rarely appears on the celebrity tracker: EMS’s seaplane PR-GVI, which departed the Théoule-sur-Mer Seaplane Base on the French Riviera and landed 11.2 hours later at Viracopos International Airport in Campinas, Brazil.

That’s a transatlantic crossing for a type more accustomed to coastal hops or island runs. EMS, a Brazilian logistics and air-taxi operator, likely repositioned the aircraft—a de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter on floats—for a South American charter season. The flight path would have required fuel stops, though the tracker shows a single block time; the seaplane’s range is roughly 800 nautical miles. The journey, while not the fastest, was the day’s longest by nearly an hour, and it underscores how far the definition of “private aviation” has stretched—from Gulfstreams to floats.

The rest of the board was a mix of corporate and billionaire errands. Google’s N10XG, a Gulfstream G650ER often used by executives including CEO Sundar Pichai, flew from San Jose to Frankfurt in 11.0 hours—a standard Silicon Valley-to-Europe business run.

Michael Saylor, the bitcoin evangelist and MicroStrategy chairman, sent his Bombardier Global 6000 N3877 from Baltimore to Prague in 7.6 hours. The destination coincides with the annual Prague Blockchain Conference, which opened yesterday; Saylor is a keynote speaker.

And a flight that caught the desk’s eye: Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s A6-COM, a Boeing 737-800 operated as the ruler of Dubai’s personal transport, completed a 9.6-hour hop from Los Angeles to London Stansted. The flight arrived just after midnight local time, and Stansted is a common tech-and-government gateway for VIPs—no customs queues, no paparazzi. The Sheikh’s presence in LA over the previous week was not announced, but such trips often involve business with entertainment or aerospace partners.

As of this morning, the tracker shows no new departures from Elon Musk’s fleet since May 23—his primary G650ER N628TS last flew Austin to Hawthorne, and his new G800 N8628 has been dark for two weeks. That stretch is unusually long for Musk, who averaged a flight every 1.2 days in 2024, per analysis by [aerocorner.com](https://aerocorner.com/blog/elon-musk-private-jets/). It suggests he may be on the ground in Texas, possibly at Starbase ahead of a Starship milestone.

SpaceX’s employee shuttle N154TS, meanwhile, is a different story. The grey 737-800 flies the LAX–Brownsville corridor roughly three times a week, according to flight history on [celebplanes.com](https://www.celebplanes.com/celebrity/spacex). After a run yesterday, it is due for a southbound leg this afternoon—the desk’s model gives it an 82% probability based on the pattern of the last four weeks. If it departs, expect another 2,000-kilogram addition to the fleet’s carbon tally by sundown.

A flight that closed just after our snapshot: Shell’s VQ-BXF, a Gulfstream G650, arrived at Midgard Airport (likely a code for a Norwegian oil-field strip) yesterday at 14:32 UTC. The desk’s prediction engine expects a return to London Luton within 48 hours. We’ll score that one by Friday morning.