Few outside of hardcore aviation circles pay much attention when a Boeing 787 Dreamliner changes hands but things are a bit different for this particular jet.
Since 2012, the Boeing 787-8 has served as the official presidential jet for Mexico, locked in by the country’s former President Felipe Calderón and famously derided and dismissed by current Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador who, for the past few years, has been on an unsuccessful campaign to sell the jet to private buyers.
No one seemed to want to take the presidential jet, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, so Obrador put in place plans to lease the Dreamliner to anyone who wanted to use it for a party. Now it appears those designs have also been canned because, after years of using it as a political statement of frugality, President Obrador has finally managed to sell what he saw as a massive financial burden to none other than the Central Asian country of Tajikistan.
The Mexican President announced the successful sale on Twitter last week, valuing the exchange at 1.66 billion pesos (AU$45 million). Considering the jet was once valued at US$130 million (AU$173 million), that’s a significant lowball but one President Obrador would have gladly jumped at seeing as just owning the jet was more of a financial black hole than anything else.
Calderón originally purchased the Dreamliner for $US218.7 million (AU$291.2 million), bringing what was apparently one of the first Dreamliners that Boeing ever built down to Mexico and retrofitting it with luxurious touches. The ostentatious, largely marble interior, which includes a full presidential suite with a bedroom and a private bathroom, was one of the major reasons President Obrador refused to ever use the jet, deeming it as a symbol of superfluous wealth and a threat to his “man of the people” image.
The jet has been configured to carry only 80 passengers, down from the 300 that this aircraft usually carries. It would have been much too expensive to reconfigure the Dreamliner back to its original layout so since President Obrador came into power it has pretty much just sat there collecting dust.
In a video accompanying his tweet, the President stated that the sale indicates how much Mexican politics has changed under his leadership. He has also promised to use the proceeds of the sale to build two 80-bed public hospitals in southern Guerrero and Oaxaca states, which are amongst Mexico’s poorest regions.
