The plane is a Cessna Citation Excel, a midsize corporate jet that typically seats eight and can fly four hours at a time. It is owned by Hensley & Company, through a holding company, King Aviation. Mrs. McCain is the chairwoman of Hensley, which is one of the country’s biggest distributors of Anheuser-Busch products. Hensley was founded by Mrs. McCain’s father, James Hensley, and her uncle.
It was her late father’s fortune, which also includes real estate, that helped start Mr. McCain’s political career. King Aviation is listed on Mr. McCain’s Senate disclosure forms as one of his wife’s assets.
The F.E.C. rules that were never finalized would have required candidates using family-owned planes to pay the aircraft’s operational costs. A Citation Excel costs about $2,000 per flight hour to operate, taking into account expenses for fuel, its crew, maintenance and other costs, according to industry experts.
For the same plane, a commercial charter company would charge about $3,000 per flight hour with a two-hour daily minimum.
The McCain campaign declined to release a detailed accounting of which trips had been made on the plane, the identities of the campaign officials who took those flights and how much the campaign had paid for each one. But it is unlikely that the campaign reimbursed King Aviation for the plane’s operating costs.
Over the seven-month period, the King Aviation jet took more than 100 flights to places on days when campaign rallies, fund-raisers or presidential debates involving Mr. McCain occurred in or near those locations, that analysis found.
That tally included repeated flights during critical primary months to states including Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. On some days, the plane made three or four campaign-related flights, the records indicate.
Separately, the plane took an additional 20 flights back and forth from Phoenix to points along the campaign trail, the analysis indicates. Based on the plane’s $2,000 hourly operating cost, the estimated cost of just those 20 flights, which took over 70 flight hours, exceeded $140,000.
The McCain campaign, however, did not pay Mrs. McCain’s company anything for those flights on which Mr. McCain or other campaign travelers were not aboard the plane, such as any empty flights to or from Phoenix.
Ms. Hazelbaker, the campaign spokeswoman, said that F.E.C. rules did not require campaigns to pay for so-called deadhead flights and that the campaign did not make such payments to King Aviation.
She said Mr. McCain’s use of his wife’s plane did not represent a shift in his position on campaign finance-related issues.
“Senator McCain’s paid use of Mrs. McCain’s family plane is explicitly permitted under the new law and does not represent any change of position on corporate jets and lobbyists,” she said.
Jan Baran, a Republican lawyer in Washington who specializes in election law, said Mrs. McCain or her company would be likely to face substantial tax consequences for the plane’s campaign-related use because such campaign-related business costs were not tax deductible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/us/politics/27plane.html
What a fucking coward and dumbass.
Been awhile since i read about his Vietnam incidents. I forgot how much of a douchebag he was, kek
Buddy Q wishes he could hang out at the pool with comfy Frens, kek
Buddy Q's name is a take on barbecue