CALLER: How are you, sir? Happy, slash, sad end of the summer to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Let’s talk aviation. I know you might want to talk about football, but I’m kind of part and parcel to aviation like yourself. What is your all-time favorite corporate jet that’s on the market?
RUSH: My all-time favorite…? (laughing) My all-time favorite corporate jet on the market. You realize this is the kind of thing if I answer it I make more enemies than friends?
CALLER: Well, could I tell you mine?
RUSH: What’s yours?
CALLER: Well, it’s a toss-up. It’s the Bombardier Global Express XRS versus the Gulfstream 650, slash, or the 550.
RUSH: Oh, yeah, but the 650 is not out yet. The 650 doesn’t roll out ’til 2012.
CALLER: I know, but it’s still a tight plane.
RUSH: All right, so why do you like the Global Express rather than the 550?
CALLER: ‘Cause the cockpit. I figure if people are going to be tooling me around at that kind of altitude and that kind of speed, the cockpit is just, you know, to die for. You’re going to have two people that you don’t know, and they’re going to be there, and it’s almost perfect. They got the head-up display, they got all of it.
RUSH: And the 550 does not have it?
CALLER: Well, I don’t know for sure. If you check out the website, the —
RUSH: Trust me, it does.
CALLER: Okay. All right. I believe you. So, anyway, what is your all-time favorite corporate jet?
RUSH: (laughing) Well… Um…
CALLER: Well, because you had variables. You have looks, performance, class, roominess, and ease of maintenance.
RUSH: Yes, all of those are factors, and there are factors even beyond that. Look, if I start answering there’s no winning this. You talk about the Global Express and the G550, they’re both fine airplanes. You know, the Global Express has a couple things on it that the 550 has. There’s a leading edge that expands you can use a short runway. You can go from Hilton Head to Hawaii nonstop from a short runway on a Global Express. A 550 it’s going to be nip and tuck depending on things but you can do a 550 from a standard runway coast to coast from North Carolina to Hawaii, too. So it’s a toss-up, six of one half a dozen of the other. The cabin is a foot wider in a Global Express, but the windows are tiny. You can look at these things any number of ways. You can look at cabin capacity, range, operating expense. The DOCs [Direct Operating Cost per flight hour] are crucial here.
CALLER: So what are they? I mean, do you want like the big, high-dollar item or what? I mean, to me, a guy that’s just barely making it, you see this stuff online, and a guy like you has all this stuff, I’d go for the Bombardier.
RUSH: Well, then that’s fine. You’re sitting there and you’re dreaming of a Bombardier. The way I look at it is this: If I’m going to go out and if I’m gonna take a look at the top line Global Express from Bombardier or a G550 or 650, I have to look at, ‘Can I land it in my runway? Or in my driveway?’
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: You know, there are all kinds of different factors here.
CALLER: Well, if you have a 4900-foot driveway then you could have the Bombardier.
RUSH: (laughing) The question is, would I build one in order to be able to accommodate either one of those airplanes? They’re both very fine, high-quality airplanes. Another thing is the wait list. It depends. If you want to buy one brand-new that’s never been owned, you’re looking at — depending on 550, 650 — four years from the day you place the order until it rolls off. The 650 is about the same thing. And I think the Bombardier is even longer. They were having problems with their completion centers some years ago with a backlog. I don’t know if they’ve been able to speed it up or not. I’m not trying to get anybody in trouble here. There’s just a tremendous number of factors here. Now, EIB 1, I’ll just tell you: It’s a G550, if that answers your question.
CALLER: Excellent. That’s a very fine choice.
RUSH: And if you go to RushLimbaugh.com to the Limbaugh Museum, just like Air Force One is in the Reagan Library out in California, we have a mock-up of EIB 1 at the Limbaugh Museum of Broadcasting on my website. You can see it there.
CALLER: So what’s your next plane going to be?
RUSH: What’s the next plane going to be?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: A 650.
CALLER: Once the miles are done and you got all the wear-and-tear out of it, what would be on the market for Rush Limbaugh?
RUSH: A 650.
CALLER: Yes!
RUSH: Now I — (laughing). I had a question asked of me the other day, and this is asked of me a lot, surprisingly. ‘Is there anything you want that you can’t have?’ And I said, ‘Of course! What kind of question is this? Of course there is.’ There’s any number of things that I would like to have that I either can’t afford or it doesn’t make sense to buy. You know, I’d love to have world peace. I don’t think I could buy Obama losing the next election, not single-handedly. I mean there’s any number of things.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: But it’s… (interruption) You think they meant material things? Not world peace or…? Material things. Yes, of course there are material things that I would like. Look, I am not yearning for anything. Is that what you mean? I mean, there’s not something (panting), ‘Man, I really want it.’ There’s nothing. But there are things out there that of course I like that I can’t afford. It’s a silly question.
CALLER: Rush, one time you could just blow up my house, just buzz my house at maybe like a hundred feet if that’s legal, that would be really cool.
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: That would be awesome, if you could do that, just blow up my neighborhood —
RUSH: Buzz by.
CALLER: — in your 550, that would be awesome. I’d like to take my video camera out there and tape it.
RUSH: My father… My father… I know what you’re talking about here. My father… This is one of the, I don’t know, saddest, most disappointing things. My father loved aviation. He flew P-51s in the China-Burma theater in World War II, and when I was growing up, he had a Cessna 182 Skylane. The tail number was 2685G(eorge). And we flew, tooled this thing around and up to St. Louis to ball games. He had to set it down in a cornfield or some kind of a field near Columbia, Missouri, during a snowstorm, and it made the papers ’cause he put it down safely and so forth and then the weather got good he was able to take it off and get it out of there. My dad would be berserk. My parents would not believe the life that I live. They didn’t think that it was possible, primarily because I didn’t go to college.
Now, they are from that generation that the formative experiences of their lives were Great Depression, World War II. There were tickets out of misery. The ticket out of the Depression was an education, a college degree. It really didn’t matter if you knew anything. You just had to have the degree. The degree said you knew something. The degree said you had done something. My dad, up until the last two years of his life, thought he had failed miserably with me ’cause I didn’t go to college. I mean, you’ve seen postgame interviews with the star of the game and the players always talk about how proud his parents are because he’s the first guy in his family ever to attend college. I’m the first in my family not to! I’m the first of my family not to have a degree. It’s thrown everybody for a loop.
My dad could go berserk. I would not be able to keep him out of the jump seat in the cockpit. He would not believe it. I guarantee you, something like that — and he dreamed of these things all the time. He had every aviation magazine that was published. He read them all the time. He’d travel to air shows and so forth. He dreamed of having a corporate jet. He dreamed of having a Learjet, just dreamed of it. But that’s all it ever was for him was a dream and pictures. We’d go to St. Louis. We’d take our little airplane to St. Louis, and they had an aircraft sales lot up there, and he’d take tours of airplanes that were for sale on the tarmac and take us with him. He toyed around. He was truly dreaming.
This is how much he dreamed. He dreamed of buying a Lockheed Electra, which is a four-engine turboprop. The Los Angeles Dodgers flew on one of those. That was their airplane in 1965. There was no way my dad was ever gonna buy a Lockheed Electra. No way. He’d take David and me on board, we went walking through it. I remember the salesmen’s name was Doc Zanny someplace at Lambert Field in St. Louis, and Doc Zanny took us on this tour, and we couldn’t tour the whole airplane ’cause it wasn’t fueled. It had a nose gear, and there wasn’t enough fuel so if we went too far back, the thing would fall back on its tail.
We were talking yesterday about the American dream, and is it still possible, and was it ever discussed. And of course my dad never sat us down and said, ‘Son, I want to tell you about the American dream,’ but you lived it. You knew it was there. It was always possible, because you were blessed to be born in America. So, if you’re a parent, one of the things that makes you happy, one of the things you shoot for is that your kids get to live your American dream. Well, I am personifying his, in one huge area, and he’s not around to see it. Well, humanly around to see it. I’m confident he’s jealous as hell watching. (laughing) I’m sure he knows, but he’s not humanly around, able to see it. But his son is living his American dream, and that’s I think what a lot of parents would hope, and do hope, for their kids. So that’s a long, roundabout way of answering your question, sir. Thanks much.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So, e-mail during the break: ‘Rush, I can’t believe, in all this talk of corporate jets, you left out the BBJ,’ which is the Boeing Business Jet, which is a Boeing 737. Now, obviously the Boeing 737… I have a friend who has one, and obviously if you fly in your own 737, yeah, that would be cool except for two things. Like Paul Allen of Microsoft. He has two Boeing 757s, two of them, plus some 500,000-foot yacht. The problem — ahem, ‘the problem’ — the objection I have to a Boeing Business Jet is you have to take it into a major airport, therefore, you have to get into all those traffic delays and so forth and line up. You can’t get into smaller airports. You can’t get into a 4000, 5000-foot runway.
Another thing — and I’m not trying to be hypercritical here, but — the last time I checked you could not get DirecTV on a Boeing 737 because the tail rudder is not wide enough to put the gyroscope antenna in there. Now, that may have changed since I last inquired about it. But the tail rudder has to be wide enough there at the top to get a DirecTV antenna in there otherwise you’re just watching DVDs when you’re flying around and that’s unacceptable. (interruption) Well, when your job is staying informed, you need it — and you have to get the BBML link up there in the tail rudder, too. That’s a wireless Internet. And if it’s too narrow, then you can’t. (interruption) Yeah, I know. You get that on, what, JetBlue, American, Delta and so forth? Yeah, but… Well, I don’t know. Maybe wireless Internet you don’t need that wide a rudder up there, but for the DirecTV you do. No question about it.