Bob Basham Private jet tracker

Robert D. "Bob" Basham moved to Tampa in the late 1970s for Steak 'n Shake, formed Sunstate Restaurant Corporation in October 1983 to develop Chili's as a franchisee alongside Chris Sullivan and Gene Knippers, and merged that business into Chili's Inc. in January 1987. A year later, on 15 March 1988, he opened the first Outback Steakhouse in Tampa with Sullivan, Tim Gannon and Trudy Cooper, and ran it as president and chief operating officer. The company Outback became — Bloomin' Brands — passed $4B in annual sales.

In late 2011 he and Nick Reader, chief executive of Basham's private investment firm MVP Holdings, opened the first PDQ ("People Dedicated to Quality") on South Dale Mabry Highway, roughly a mile from the original Outback.

N828ML is a 1997 Dassault Falcon 900EX trijet (S/N 025, hex AB4FB1), FAA-registered to Walkabout Air Inc of Tampa, status Valid to February 2028. The attribution here is unusually clean for this roster: Walkabout Air is not an anonymous holding LLC but the aviation company Basham himself founded in 1995 — the name is a nod to Outback's Australian theming — and it does aircraft management, charter and sales out of Tampa.

That cuts both ways. Because Walkabout is a working management and charter operation, not every leg N828ML flies is Basham's; some are third-party charter. Read individual flights as the aircraft's rather than the man's. The jet is photographed at Tampa International, which is the working base, with East Coast runs such as Raleigh-Durham on the record.