When they get to the financial level where they can afford to do so, many top tour golfers prefer to travel by private jet rather than on commercial airlines. Some golfers have taken this a step further and, rather than charter jets, they own them.
Some have taken it a further step still, and have got their own pilot’s licence. Perhaps the most famous golfer pilot was Arnold Palmer.
He only retired from flying planes when he was 81, by which time he had spent nearly 55 years as a pilot and had logged almost 20,000 flight hours. He also has a flying world record.
In 1976 he and his co-pilots Jim Bir and Bill Purkey circumnavigated the globe in a business jet in 57 hours, 25 minutes, and 42 seconds. The journey was made in a Learjet 36 and broke the previous record by more than 28 hours.
Palmer has been described as a very good pilot. The seven-time Major winner reckoned that piloting a plane was “a lot like golf. The thing that was most important was that you used your head and did only what you thought you knew you could do.”
Arnold Palmer looks out of the window of his branded jet from the pilot’s seat
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Greg Norman, who learnt the fly in the 1980s, had not originally intended to become a pro golfer. “I lived next to a Royal Australian Air Force base where F-111s were taking off,” he explained. “I was probably 13 or 14, and I was infatuated by them. In high school, I was doing the preliminary training to join the Air Force and become a pilot.”
Buying versus hiring
Another whose youth had a strong aviation influence was Phil Mickelson. His father was a naval aviator and Phil himself earned a pilot’s licence and bought a Gulfstream V.
But he later sold it. He explained that when he and his wife “would travel to the mountains to go ski, I would need to know months in advance when I was going to go, so that I could get a hangar. Otherwise, if the plane sits outside, things freeze. And there is a huge additional expense that always comes up.”
Instead he decided to charter private jets instead through VistaJet as he: “can tell them hours in advance, and they drop us off wherever we want to go and they deal with all the logistics.”
Jon Rahm was another who gave up private jet ownership – in his case a fractional…
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