It's owned by a charter company, Deer Jet, based out of....you guessed it, Dubai. It actually has a very AF-1 feel to it, with the luxury stuff in half the plane and standard business class seats in another section to put all your lackeys and/or the press.
The numbers quoted were kinda interesting... Apparently, the jet costs $300mm to purchase and can be rented for $74k/hr. Assuming that this is $74k per flight hour and that, conservatively, the plane spends 5 hours on the ground for every flight hour, it might represent an asset with an interesting yield. Obviously, it all depends on whether it's in demand and the various costs associated with running the business.
Assuming 4 hours of flight time a day is probably pretty optimistic for a one-off charter plane like this, especially given you can't really configure it for anything but moving a limited number of people around. The average annual utilization for a part 135 charter turbojet is 326.5 hours (http://nata.aero/data/files/gia/4656_001.pdf), so that's about .9 hours a day on average. Operating costs are about $8,000/hour for United's 787, although your crew and some of the maintenance costs are fixed for this guy and utilization is way lower, so they'll be a bit higher cost per hour. But assuming those average numbers you're looking at around $21.5M/year in gross profit before any marketing or company overhead, so 13 year simple payback and not a great IRR given the risk. I'm thinking this is a loss leader precisely so they can claim to be "The World's Only Private Boeing 787 Dreamliner!" which is worth something in Dubai. If you couldn't tell, I spent many years as a pilot and am now an entrepreneur so I've gamed most business scenarios around aviation. I've sadly come to the conclusion that Branson was probably right, to paraphrase his quote, that the best way to become a millionaire is to start off with a billion dollars and launch an aviation related company. But I'm always still looking!
Thank you for the numbers... To be honest, I've looked at some aircraft lease-related investments that had attractive yields, especially given that they're secured (aircraft itself was the collateral). So I was sorta curious about this one. I wonder what this Deer Jet's (or is it Dear Jet?) cost of capital might be, especially in light of the numbers you've provided.
Hard to say on the cost of capital out of Dubia, I think they've been in a bubble for a long time. VistaJet is the most recent comp bond I know of and they were at 7.7%, so not a great rate. The thing you have to remember about the "collateral" here is that it's highly subject to systemic risk. The below are all collateral collecting dust at Pinal Airpark for all intents and purposes worthless despite the fact you see a number of relatively modern, nice looking planes there. There are a half dozen of these around the country that I've seen, all packed with hundreds of planes, most of which are aircraft models that are still in operation in modern fleets but there were just a few too many of them or their airline went under and dumped a bunch on the market (I can see a bunch of Mexicana planes in this picture, for example).
Yeah, I guess you have to price in the risk of your collateral being valued at 0 at the time of default...