Engines Away!

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As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing out there— up there—that's better; this is the quietest, smoothest, most functional, most comfortable penthouse-on-wings in existence," maintains the owner of a private Boeing 727-100, which he recently had reengineered to a Super 27 that can fly higher, faster, and longer. "I think I did the greatest amount of renovation that's ever been done on a 727—I put 100,000 man-hours in this. And thanks to the amazing Craig Wright, it's got a lot of aesthetic wow factor, too."

Wright, for his part, recalls how one day last year, at Le Bourget Airport in Paris, while the plane was waiting for the owner to arrive so it could take off ("I always get there early," the designer explains, "because I like to arrange the flowers; it's work, but it's not as annoying as looking for eight hours at what someone else has done"), the Sultan of Brunei's pilot came over to ask if he could have a peek inside, "and at the end of the little tour he said, quite petulantly I thought, I wish our plane looked like this.' "

The owner confesses, "I'm just having fun. It's a toy, you know. It's a Roman candle—you light it up and it goes off."

Indeed, so good does this Boeing look, and so great does it run, that the owner, just nine months after starting service on it, upped and sold his Gulfstream 5. "There's something about a wide-body plane with 1,000 square feet of floor space that's addictive, and I just didn't feel like flying in a little tube of 300 square feet anymore. With my G5," he elaborates, "I would never think of inviting more than a few guests, what with the narrow, cramped cabin and low ceiling, not to mention the lack of proper bed and bath—when someone walked by you to go to the john, it would wake you up."

His Boeing, in sharp contrast, offers four discrete areas of privacy and sleeps 10 in high comfort. "Everyone is always excited to get back on the ship, no matter how much fun they've been having wherever we were, because when you can fly this way—and the same thing often gets said about life itself—it's not the destination that counts, it's the journey." No wonder the owner, for all that he has houses in Beverly Hills, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, Malibu, Aspen, Saint-Tropez, and the French Alps, spends roughly (make that smoothly) three months a year traveling on his plane.

Before "picking this particular ship," he had looked at all the available 727s. With a life cycle of more than 100,000 hours, it still had two-thirds of its usefulness in front of it. For its first 14 years it had plied the skies in the guise of a Pan Am Clipper, routinely carrying 140 or so passengers. Then it was reconfigured to serve—which it admirably did for the next 25 years—as the personal plane of a Fortune 100 chairman. "He was a pilot himself and, you know, he babied it." Still, the first thing post-test-flight that the new owner did was have it flown down to a completion center in San Antonio for a two-year ground-up restoration and upgrade.

The interior was gutted—stripped to not only its ribs but its rivets—and the pieces conveyed to a nearby hangar where each one was inspected and, if necessary, reconstructed; then the resulting full-scale mock-up was reassembled back on the plane. At the same time, two of the three engines on the tail were replaced with larger, more efficient, and exponentially more powerful ones, and the third was rebuilt; all the instrumentation was highly modified ("We meet Stage Four—the current environmental requirements of the newest airplanes"); and extra fuel tanks were added, as well as heavier landing gear ("We really weight up—we're 175,000 pounds fully loaded").

The 727 was nicknamed the "Whisper Jet" because it was so quiet you could actually whisper in the cabin and be heard; the state-of-the-art sound-suppression insulation material, the so-called hush kit, that the owner installed in the liner of his plane makes it, he insists, the quietest 727 ever—that rare aircraft where you don't even hear the engines, only the rush of air, when you take off. "There's a special little trick that he does—I always sit backward for it," Wright confides, describing how the plane takes off at a very steep pitch, "like a rocket ship. Mind you, it can take off like any other airliner, wobbling down a runway for thousands of feet, but it's so incredible it can just go straight up." The owner confesses, and more power to him, "I do it mostly because I enjoy the thrill of it. Because I can do it. I'm just having fun. It's a toy, you know. It's a Roman candle—you light it up and it goes off."

One of the features he appreciated most about the plane when he bought it was its layout—"I reragged it but didn't have to change any of the configuration." There are two generous staterooms, separated by a full bath with a large circular shower. The master stateroom is for the owner and his wife; the smaller is for their six-year-old son ("He's got his own room on the plane, he's got his toys"), and when he isn't on board, they use it as their private dining room. There's an aft lounge, with separate bath, which can be used as a private office—and is, when he's along for the ride, by Wright, who happily proclaims, "I like to spread out in the rear"; a main lounge, which sports a banquette, leather seats, and sofas, a couple of which convert to full-size beds; and a forward lounge, complete with galley and bath, for the crew ("They're fully self-contained," says the owner).

All of the above-mentioned furniture is, needless to say, new, the trappings that came with the plane having struck the owner as too corporate in feeling to retain. It was the Los Angeles-based Wright who then suggested redoing the interior in the spirit of a luxury ocean liner in the spacious days of transatlantic travel. One of the objects he went on to acquire even graced the 1930s Moderne-style wonder-liner Normandie : Jean Dunand's maquette for the grand relief in the boat's smoking room, purchased at auction in Paris. "The theme on that relief is horses, and I was looking for something for the main lounge of the plane that had some reference to the owner's life." (He is, it should be noted, an internationally rated polo player. "I keep two strings of ponies in California, and I've got one string in France, and I play polo in Argentina but I don't have my own string there," he volunteers. "And my son's been in Pee Wee Polo since he was four.") Wright further recommended a palette of saddle tones, and designer and owner together came up with the idea for the special Hermès-stitching detail on the leather seating.

Mohair, a material at once soft and durable, was selected for the banquette and the bulkheads, but for the latter it was gauffraged in an Art Déco pattern so as not to show wear. Wright's original carpet design was vetoed by the wife. "It was maybe a little too Napoleon III for her—you know, I get a little pretentious now and again, and I think she wanted it a tad more understandable perhaps for her friends," he reflects. He repaired to the drawing board and returned with a swirly pattern safely inspired by one on the Normandie.

In further deference to that lavishly outfitted ship, which was the last word in luxe for its day, all the crystal on the plane, champagne flutes included, is Lalique. Even the ceiling fixture is modeled after a Lalique design; cast in resin out of considerations of safety and weight, it nonetheless succeeds in giving the illusion of crystal. A series of lamps in a classic Lalique pattern also had to be executed in resin. "We went through the tortures of hell to get it right," the designer says. "For every one that we were able to use, there were four or five that just didn't look real enough."

Customarily, as soon as the plane reaches cruising altitude, the cabin attendants "haul out an authentic Lalique sturgeon, a sculpture of a fish— and the Buccellati grape leaves—and set up a caviar buffet on the sideboard, with very good bottles of wine and champagne. And, I might add, he's very generous with the caviar. And if there's any left over they bring it right to me to finish it off—and, oddly, there usually is."

"We do travel well—we have five-star service," the owner concedes. "There's a gourmet kitchen. I like to make omelettes in the morning. I make steaks. We pop popcorn at 41,000 feet." Even the table linens Wright had a hand in. "We sent them out to be laundered once, in some remote place like Nepal, and they boiled them," he recalls with a shudder. "When they came back, they were still beautiful, just much, much smaller—one of the cloths had shrunk eight inches. So then I had to have enough additional ones made so they would never have to be laundered in, shall we say, rustic conditions. So then that led to another problem—to have enough storage space for the extra linens."

For a designer who flies private as often as not, there remains an even more pressing problem: Whenever he's reduced to flying commercial, Wright confesses, "I just sit there trying to pretend it's not even happening. I just can't get used to it—I'm totally ruined for life!"