George Lucas flies to New Jersey as his narrative art museum nears opening

George Lucas flew from Palmdale Regional Airport to Teterboro Airport on June 14, arriving just after midnight in a Gulfstream V that spent four hours and fourteen minutes crossing the country. The trip from the high desert north of Los Angeles to northern New Jersey came at the end of a week that saw Lucas’s jet make several shorter hops around California, including a round trip to the San Francisco Bay Area on June 12.

The same week Lucas landed in New Jersey, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art was completing final preparations for its September 22 opening in Los Angeles, per a Vogue feature published this spring. The museum, which Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson have spent more than a decade developing, will house over 1,000 works from their personal collection and sits on an 11-acre site in Exposition Park. Lucas has described the project as the culmination of his life’s study of storytelling, one that he hopes will elevate illustration and comic art to the same standing as fine art.

Lucas’s recent flight history shows a pattern of shuttling between his Bay Area home base and Southern California, with occasional trips to the Midwest and East Coast. The June 14 flight to Teterboro, however, does not correspond to any known public appearance or event in the New York area this week. It may simply be a personal or business visit, or a repositioning of the aircraft ahead of the museum’s opening push.