Table of Contents
In July 2007, Larry Page and Sergey Brin secured something no other billionaire had: the right to park up to nine private aircraft at a working federal airfield less than 4 miles (6 km) from their own headquarters. The price was $1.4 million a year and a promise to fly science missions for NASA.
What moved into Moffett Federal Airfield over the following years was not a jet but a small airline. A Boeing 767-200 bought from Qantas, a Boeing 757, a pair of Gulfstream Vs, and a 1982 Dornier Alpha Jet, a two-seat Cold War attack trainer that really did fly atmospheric research for NASA Ames.
Almost all of that fleet is gone now, replaced by Gulfstream G650ERs and, in Brin’s case, by a 400-foot airship. Below is the full record: every aircraft, its tail number and registry status in the FAA’s September 2026 database, the fuel discount that drew a federal inspector general’s attention, and where each airframe ended up.
Quick facts about the Google founders’ private jets
The Google Founders’ Complete Private Jet Fleet
The founders have never registered aircraft in their own names. The airliners and the fighter jet sat under two Palo Alto entities, Blue City Holdings and H211 LLC, while the current Gulfstreams sit under owner trusts in Utah, a standard arrangement in business aviation.
Here is the fleet, current aircraft first, with the FAA registry details for each airframe.
Why the registry does not say Page or Brin
None of these aircraft list a founder as the registered owner. Bank of Utah Trustee and similar Utah entities are owner trustees, a legal structure used across business aviation to hold title. Since April 2025 the FAA has also let private owners ask for their name and address to be withheld from public view, a change required by the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. The public file for N998PB now carries no registrant name at all.
The Origin Story: How Two Founders Built a Private Airline
The Google founders’ fleet grew in step with the company, then shrank once the scrutiny arrived. This is the sequence, from the Qantas 767 to the airship that now lives in the hangar they restored.
2005
A used Qantas 767 becomes the Google jet. Blue City Holdings, the entity behind Page, Brin and then-CEO Eric Schmidt, buys a 1987-build Boeing 767-200 and registers it as N2767 in June. Reporting at the time put the purchase around $15 million with a further $10 million spent stripping the 181-seat cabin down to roughly 50 seats.
July 2007
The Moffett Field deal. H211 LLC signs an agreement with NASA Ames to base up to nine aircraft at Moffett Federal Airfield for $1.4 million a year, in exchange for carrying science instruments. The name H211 refers to Hangar 211 on the field.
August 2007
A Boeing 757 joins. N1757 is registered through a Utah owner trustee, with the radio call sign filed by Blue City Holdings the following month. The founders now have two airliners of their own.
December 2007
They buy a fighter jet. H211 acquires a 1982 Dornier Alpha Jet, a European attack trainer, registered N165XA and later N2165. It is fitted out to carry NASA atmospheric sensors.
July 2010
The Alpha Jet is certified experimental. The FAA issues its experimental airworthiness certificate, and sustained data collection for NASA begins by January 2011.
December 2013
The fuel report lands. NASA’s Office of Inspector General finds H211 paid between $3.3 million and $5.3 million below market rate for fuel at Moffett between September 2007 and August 2013, because the supplier applied a government contractor rate to private flights too.
2014
Google leases the airfield, the 757 leaves. NASA signs a 60-year lease for about 1,000 acres of Moffett Field with Planetary Ventures, a Google subsidiary. In July the 757 gives up the mark N1757 and re-registers in Bermuda as VQ-BTF.
2018
Both remaining oddities go. The 767 flies out of Moffett for the last time on May 9 and changes hands within weeks, ending up in Guernsey as 2-TSSA. On June 14 the Alpha Jet crash-lands at Mather Airport near Sacramento during an instructional flight and burns. Both pilots survive.
2019
The Gulfstream era. A 2018-build Gulfstream G650ER, N232G, receives its certificate in June and becomes the aircraft most associated with Brin. Two more G650ERs, N998PB and N618PB, carry the PB mark read as Page and Brin.
October 2024
Brin’s airship flies free. Pathfinder 1, built inside Hangar 2 at Moffett by his company LTA Research, makes its first untethered flight on October 24 after a year of tethered testing.
March 2026
Hangar One reopens. Google’s Planetary Ventures completes the restoration of the 1933 Navy airship hangar in December 2025 and unveils it on March 20, 2026, closing the loop between the airfield the founders leased and the airship one of them now funds.
Inside the Gulfstream G650ER: The Current Flagship
The founders’ three G650ERs are the same aircraft in three model years. Gulfstream’s extended-range flagship covers 7,500 nautical miles at Mach 0.85, which puts San Francisco within one hop of Tokyo, Sydney or almost anywhere in Europe.
That matters for two men whose lives are spread across the Bay Area, Miami and the South Pacific. It is also the aircraft of choice for most of their peers, which is why the type dominates any list of the longest range private jets in service.
Performance
Cabin
Ownership
Only one of the three is straightforward to attribute. N232G, a 2018 airframe held by Bank of Utah Trustee, is consistently tracked as Brin’s and flies mostly out of San Jose International, a short drive from his Bay Area homes.
N998PB is the older of the pair that wear the PB mark, a 2014 aircraft long based at Moffett. Its FAA file was reissued in February 2026 with the registrant’s name withheld, so the public record no longer names an owner at all.
N618PB, a 2022 build held by Maurice James Airplane LLC, is the aircraft jet-tracking sites most often attribute to Page. The FAA record names only the LLC, so treat the link as reported rather than documented.
What is documented is its commercial history. The jet spent part of 2024 on charter operator Elevate Jet’s Part 135 certificate before being withdrawn from it, a common way for a private owner to offset the cost of an idle airframe.
The Boeing 767 That Became the Google Jet
No private aircraft of the 2000s attracted quite the coverage of N2767. It was a full-size widebody airliner, bought secondhand from Qantas, flown by three technology executives for personal travel.
The refit took a cabin designed for 181 passengers down to roughly 50 seats, with two staterooms, adjoining lavatories and a shower. Contemporary reporting on the conversion described a disagreement between the founders over the beds, settled by Eric Schmidt telling each of them to have whatever bed he wanted in his own room.
The airframe itself was ordinary enough: a 1987 Boeing 767-200ER, serial 23896, a type good for up to 6,385 nautical miles and a Mach 0.80 cruise. What made it unusual was that it flew out of a NASA airfield instead of a commercial one.
N2767 made its last departure from Moffett on May 9, 2018. Its registration was cancelled that June, the aircraft passed through a Malaysian buyer, and by 2020 it was flying as 2-TSSA on the Guernsey register. The N-number has since been reassigned to an unrelated light aircraft in Ohio.
The Fighter Jet That Flew Science Missions
The strangest aircraft the founders ever bought was a Dornier Alpha Jet, the Franco-German trainer and light attack aircraft that once served the German Air Force. H211 acquired the 1982 airframe in December 2007, a few months after the Moffett agreement was signed.
It was not a toy. Fitted with instruments for NASA Ames, it received an experimental airworthiness certificate in July 2010 and flew research missions at up to 27,000 feet, with a radius under 700 miles (1,130 km) and an endurance of about two and a half hours. Most sorties ran over California and Nevada.
Its career ended on June 14, 2018, when it crash-landed at Mather Airport near Sacramento during an instructional flight and caught fire. The pilot and instructor both survived, and NASA later described losing a year of aircraft availability. The registration was formally cancelled in May 2022.
Why a private jet at a NASA airfield needed a science mission
Moffett Federal Airfield is not open to general aviation. The science flights were the legal basis for the arrangement: H211 carried NASA instruments, and in exchange its aircraft could use a runway four miles from Google’s campus while everyone else used San Jose or San Francisco.
The Moffett Field Deal and the Fuel Controversy
The arrangement was contentious from the start, and the numbers are what made it so. Between July 2007 and January 2011, the founders’ passenger jets made at least 576 flights into Moffett before sustained science data collection began.
Between August 2012 and July 2013, roughly three of every four of H211’s 229 flights had no connection to NASA. The Alpha Jet, the aircraft actually carrying the instruments, flew around 60 missions in that same window.
What the inspector general found
In December 2013, NASA’s Office of Inspector General reported that H211 had paid between $3.3 million and $5.3 million below market rate for fuel at Moffett between September 2007 and August 2013. The fuel supplier had applied the rate reserved for government agencies and contractors to the company’s private flights as well. The OIG said the situation engendered a sense of unfairness and a perception of favoritism, and recommended NASA find a remedy with the company.
NASA moved to end the discount after the report, and the wider question of who should control Moffett was resolved the following year. In 2014 the agency signed a 60-year lease for about 1,000 acres of the airfield with Planetary Ventures, a Google subsidiary, worth a reported $1.16 billion in rent over its term.
Part of that bargain was Hangar One, the 1933 Navy airship shed that had been stripped to its steel frame because its siding was contaminated. Google finished re-cladding and restoring it in December 2025 and unveiled the result on March 20, 2026.
Sergey Brin’s 400-Foot Airship
Brin’s most ambitious aircraft is not a jet at all. LTA Research, the company he founded in 2013 and funds personally, built Pathfinder 1 inside Hangar 2 at Moffett, a few hundred yards from where the 767 used to park.
Pathfinder 1 is a rigid airship 400 feet (122 m) long and 66 feet (20 m) in diameter, holding about 807,000 cubic feet of helium inside a frame built with help from Luftschiffbau Zeppelin. Twelve Emrax electric motors of 210 kW each drive its propellers, for a top speed near 75 mph (120 km/h).
It received a special airworthiness certificate in September 2023, began tethered tests that November, and made its first untethered flight on October 24, 2024. Registered N125LT, it remains on the FAA register with an airworthiness date of April 2026 and an expanded flight envelope over San Francisco Bay.
The stated purpose is humanitarian aid
LTA argues that an airship can deliver relief supplies to disaster zones where runways and roads are gone, since it needs neither. Pathfinder 1 carries 2 crew and up to 12 people, and a larger sister ship, Pathfinder 3, is being built in Akron, Ohio.
How the Google Founders Compare to Other Tech Billionaires
Silicon Valley’s founders have converged on the same airplane. Almost every flagship in the table below is a Gulfstream G650 family aircraft, held through a trust or an LLC, and registered between 2014 and 2024.
| Owner | Flagship aircraft | Tail number | Build year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sergey Brin | Gulfstream G650ER | N232G | 2018 |
| Larry Page (reported) | Gulfstream G650ER | N618PB | 2022 |
| Elon Musk | Gulfstream G650ER | N628TS | 2015 |
| Mark Zuckerberg | Gulfstream G700 | N3880 | 2024 |
| Larry Ellison | Gulfstream G650 | N817GS | 2014 |
What separates Page and Brin is not the jet, it is everything around it. Elon Musk’s private jets and Mark Zuckerberg’s fleet fly from ordinary airports, while the Google founders negotiated their own access to a federal airfield and eventually leased it.
They are also the only pair on that list who bought a widebody airliner together. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison have built multi-aircraft fleets, but neither ran a converted 767 out of a NASA runway for 13 years.
The Most Famous Google Jet Flights
The Tahiti runs
The flights that first drew press attention were holidays. Reporting in 2011 estimated that the 767 and a Gulfstream burned roughly 52,000 gallons of jet fuel on two round trips from the mainland United States to Tahiti.
Moffett to Beijing, May 2011
On May 6, 2011, the Boeing 757 flew from Moffett Field to Beijing with a stop in Anchorage. It is one of the trips that flight records tie to Google’s long pursuit of the Chinese market, made in the year after the company pulled its search engine out of mainland China.
The last flight of N2767
On May 9, 2018, the 767 left Moffett Field for the last time under Google ownership. The registration changed hands the next day, and the aircraft that had defined the founders’ aviation reputation left the country within weeks.
Pathfinder 1 over the Golden Gate
Since its flight envelope was widened, Brin’s airship has flown across San Francisco Bay and past the Golden Gate Bridge, a sight the area has not had since the Navy’s airship era. LTA describes Pathfinder 1 as the only rigid airship flying anywhere today.
Taken together, the Google founders’ aviation story is less about luxury than about access. Two men who could have bought any jet on the market instead bought an airliner, a fighter trainer and, eventually, the lease on an airport.
FAQ
Sources and references used for research and fact-checking.
- Tech Transparency Project, A Fighter Jet and Friends in Congress: How Google Got Access to a NASA Airfield
- Tech Transparency Project, Methodology and Plane Ownership
- Palo Alto Online, Inspector General: Google execs saved millions on jet fuel at Moffett
- CNBC, Google execs got huge jet fuel discounts, NASA says
- Federal Aviation Administration, Aircraft Registration Inquiry and releasable aircraft database
- Federal Aviation Administration, FAA Moves to Protect Aircraft Owners' Private Information
- Simple Flying, The Private Jet Collection Of Google Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
- San Jose Spotlight, Google unveils historic restoration of Hangar One in Mountain View
- Wikipedia, Pathfinder 1 (airship)
- Wikipedia, Gulfstream G650, G700 and G800
- Wikipedia, Boeing 767
- ch-aviation, US's Elevate Jet retires only G650ER
- Slashdot, Google Founders' Jets Caught On WSJ's Radar
Get the Newsletter
The latest aviation news and stories sent to your inbox.
About the Author
Tim is the owner and lead editor of AeroCorner since 2019, overseeing aviation content covering aircraft, airlines, airports, and the broader aviation industry. Through years of researching, writing, editing, and publishing aviation-focused content, he has developed extensive practical knowledge of commercial aviation and air travel. Based in Asia and a frequent traveler himself, Tim also brings firsthand passenger experience to AeroCorner’s coverage. Outside of publishing, he has also explored aviation firsthand through hands-on flight training in New Zealand.