US: John Travolta's new pad in Florida has eight parking spaces - six forhis cars and two for his aeroplanes. Oh, and a 1.4 mile runwayround the back. Jonathan Glancey reports
"I Called my son Jett and I wanted to call my daughter Qantas, but my wife wouldn't let me." John Travolta was, he says, only joking - about his daughter - although this self-confessed "airline geek" just happens to own a former Qantas jet.
And what a jet: a 600 m.ph. 134ft 6in long, 250,000lb, 1964 Boeing 707-138B airliner. The 49-year-old Hollywood actor also just happens to park this classic aircraft in the backyard of his elegant new Florida home.
As any self-respecting Hollywood star does. A Gulfstream executive jet keeps it company. The house, meanwhile, looks like a take on an art deco or Bauhaus airport terminal of the 1930s, complete with an ersatz control tower rising from the roof.
Keeping up with the Travoltas is, it would appear, a touch more challenging than keeping up with the old school Joneses, whose wildest neighbour-blowing ambition might stretch, if they happen to be among the 650,000 private pilots in the US, to a Cessna-152. That is the chug-along, piston-engined plane most amateur pilots learn to fly in. Yours for 20,000 bucks, second-hand.
A full-blown Boeing, capable of flying around the world - which it did, in 2002, with Travolta in old-style captain's uniform at the controls - is slightly more expensive to buy and run, and pretty unbeatable in the one-upmanship stakes. Unless, that is, the Joneses could run to a jumbo jet. There are plenty of pre-owned models on the market for a few million bucks apiece. Travolta can fly one, but has yet to trade up from his 707 to a bigger Boeing. Not that there would be a problem chez Travolta with a 747.
The airstrip that serves Jumbolair, the fly-in Florida development where the family airport stands, is 1.4 miles long. The mainrunways at London Heathrow might be half-a-mile or so longer, but are not readily accessible to those living nearby even if they pitched together to buy a second-hand Tiger Moth.
Travolta's is surely the ultimate boys' fantasy home made real. Aside from the parking lots for the brace of jets, there is a garden in the guise of a heliport, further parking for at least six swanky cars, a swimming pool with swirling hot tub, that 1.4-mile runway, a gym and stables for the 75 horses down the road.
The Travoltas used to live at the Spruce Creek Fly-In estate, Daytona Beach, Florida, but neighbours - there are 1,500 homes with planes there - complained of the noise. It was not just jealousy; have you ever heard a Boeing 707 take off? Right next door?
The first generation of jet airliners made The Who sound as quiet as Peter, Paul and Mary. As for coming in to land, there is absolutely no question of the dog mistaking the sound of his master's engines for those of the Cessna next door; equally there is not a chance that the homecoming father will hear his children crying "Daddy! Here comes daddy!" as the mighty Boeing roars down the runway.
There might just have been a slight stirring of the green-eyed monster in Daytona Beach: Travolta's globe-galloping jet once belonged to Frank Sinatra. And you can bet there is more to inflight dining on this chic, dolled-up ship than the statutory airline "chicken or fish?". Pre-owned 707s are not just loud playthings for the super-rich; they are also super cool.
Not so air-park housing developments as a whole. There are about 450 of these in the US - 78 in Florida alone - according to the Living With Your Plane Association, which knows about these things. Many are remarkably prosaic; they are not even particularly expensive. It is just that they have Cessnas rather than Ford pick-ups parked beside the door.
The first, called an "air ranch" and dating from 1941, was built in Carmel Valley, California, by Byington Ford, a man who believed that aircraft would, one day, be just as popular as Henry Ford's automobiles.
Rather unfortunately, the first complete "hangar homes" on the ranch were unveiled on December 7th, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. All private planes flying the West Coast were grounded. Travolta flew daily from home to Tampa during last autumn's shoot of The Punisher, an action movie based on the antics of a Marvel comic-book hero, due to be released this spring.
The actor, according to a local newspaper, "can walk out his door, under a canopied walkway and into the cockpit [of his Boeing], open the long mechanised gate [giving on to the runway] and be airborne in minutes." - (Guardian Service)