Adobe's coast-to-coast 10-hour dash, and the El Niño calculus ahead

The day closed with 81 flights, 64,578 miles flown, and 136.2 hours aloft — but the one number that lingers is the CO₂ tally: 581.5 tonnes, enough to fill a small village’s annual footprint. Arthur Blank was the day’s top mover with four legs totalling 10.9 hours, while the heaviest emitter was the Indian presidential flight under Narendra Modi, which pumped 87.9 tonnes into the atmosphere. The destination heat-spot was OEDF — a small Saudi airstrip that drew three arrivals, hinting at some undisclosed gathering in the desert.

The day’s longest and most editorially loaded flight belonged to Adobe Inc.

. Their Bombardier Global 6000, tail N82123, lifted from London Heathrow at dawn and spent 10.0 hours crossing the Atlantic to San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport. The flight is interesting not just for its duration — a standard westbound slog — but for its timing: it left London the morning after the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority released a surprise statement on AI partnerships, a development that Adobe, with its growing generative AI suite, would have been watching closely. (BBC reported the CMA review on 24 July.)

Narendra Modi’s presidential flight, tail K7066, logged a puzzling 9.1-hour sector from Palam Air Force Station to Indira Gandhi International Airport — a distance of barely 10 miles. The data suggests either a holding pattern or a data-lag glitch, but either way the aircraft burned 87.9 tonnes, making it the day’s CO₂ champion.

More straightforward was Novartis’s HB-JFQ, which flew from Pittsburgh to Basel in 7.5 hours — a textbook transatlantic for the Swiss pharma giant, likely ferrying executives back from a board review.

Rick Hendrick’s N1RH zipped from Concord to Santa Barbara in 4.1 hours, a classic owner-pilot run, while Jeff Bezos’s N11AF flew Kalaeloa to LAX in 4.4 hours, a routine inter-island-to-mainland hop.

This morning, the climate conversation is shifting. Carbon Brief’s latest analysis, published today, gives a 35% chance that 2026 will beat 2024 as the warmest year on record, driven by a rapidly developing El Niño that could become the strongest in modern records. We expect that climatologists and policy advisers — including some tracked owners — may begin repositioning aircraft toward IPCC-related meetings or emergency summits. Separately, the US-Iran diplomatic pause over the Strait of Hormuz, reported by AA.com.tr this morning, could see shuttle flights between Oman and Washington. Tracked owners with Gulfstreams stationed in the Middle East are ones to watch.

Evan Spiegel’s N3E left LAX yesterday on an unlogged destination — the typical pattern for a Snap founder heading to a quiet retreat. Arthur Blank’s N62LV is still showing a track to Malta, where his yacht may be waiting. Expect at least one of these to file a destination before sundown.