John Travolta's Plane: The Qantas 707, His Pilot Ratings, and the Runway at Home

John Travolta is a pilot as well as an actor, and for two decades the answer to what plane he owned was a Boeing 707 that Qantas had flown in the 1960s. It is not his anymore. He gave it to the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society, a volunteer aviation museum south of Sydney, in 2017. In May 2026 its fuselage and wings came off a cargo ship at Port Kembla, New South Wales, and on October 12, 2026, the Illawarra Mercury reported that the wings were due to go back on that week.

The 707 is the four-engine Boeing jet that carried the airlines into the jet age at the end of the 1950s. His was a rare version, and he flew it himself: around the world for Qantas in 2002, into Port-au-Prince with earthquake supplies in 2010, and home to his own front yard.

Home is Ocala, Florida, in Jumbolair, a fly-in community built around a private runway, where the houses have room for airplanes beside them. For the house he and his late wife, the actress Kelly Preston, built there, the trust that holds it, and the map, see John Travolta's Ocala home profile on Velvet Ropes. The deed and the land's earlier lives are in our article on John Travolta's house.

John Travolta's House

Ocala · Marion County, Florida

The fly-in house at Jumbolair, the trust on the record, and the map.

A Qantas jet from 1964

Qantas took delivery of the airplane on September 10, 1964, as VH-EBM, City of Launceston, and flew its first paying passengers in it from Sydney to Tokyo on October 2, according to Region Illawarra. It was a shorter-bodied 707 that Boeing built for Qantas, one of 13 in a batch that Airline Ratings says was known as the hot rods, and the last of them. Qantas moved up to a larger 707 and withdrew this one from service in April 1968, three and a half years after delivery.

Then it went private, and the sources part ways on who had it. Airline Ratings says Braniff International bought it in 1969, that it was converted to a VIP jet in 1973, and that Frank Sinatra and Kirk Kerkorian were among the owners after that; the Illawarra Mercury also calls it a former Sinatra plane. Region Illawarra's list of operators runs Braniff, then Tracinda, then TAG of Saudi Arabia, which refitted the cabin as a VIP suite with private sleeping rooms and lounges. It does not mention Sinatra.

Travolta knew the plane before he owned it. Airline Ratings says he first came across it while making Get Shorty and waited until 1998 for the price to come down. Region Illawarra says he had rented it to commute across the Atlantic for film work, and that it was in storage in Las Vegas when he bought it in May 1998. In a 2013 interview quoted by Region Illawarra, his reason fit in one sentence: he fell in love with it on a departure, when he walked back into its private sleeping cabin.

Qantas colors and a 10-country tour

For four years he paid the upkeep himself. Then, Airline Ratings says, he struck a deal with Qantas's chief executive, Geoff Dixon: Qantas colors on the plane, Travolta as the airline's ambassador, and Qantas paying for maintenance.

Dixon pinned Qantas wings on him in June 2002 and named him the airline's ambassador-at-large, Hello reported. Travolta had first completed the airline's simulator training as a first officer, the co-pilot's seat, on the Boeing 747-400, partly at Boeing in Seattle. He was 48, and called it “one of the proudest days of my life.”

The 707 went into Qantas paint that year. On July 1, 2002, he flew it out of Los Angeles on the Spirit of Friendship tour, a loop through 10 countries that started in Auckland and took in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt, and New York. It was 10 months after September 11, and he described the trip as a way to extend a hand of friendship across borders.

What his ratings mean

He started young and quit twice. Travolta told the Associated Press in 2008 that he took his first flying lessons at 15, walked away from them twice, and found an instructor who cried when he quit a third time. He soloed the next day. The AP dates his full license to 1978.

A pilot's license is the start. Big jets are different: each model needs its own type rating, a separate qualification for that one airplane, with its own training and its own check flight, added on top of the license. In March 2022 he posted a short video on Instagram saying he had passed his test for the Boeing 737, which he counted alongside the 707 and 747 ratings he already held. A rating qualifies a pilot to fly the type. It does not make him an airline pilot, and nothing he has said suggests he wants to be one.

Haiti, January 2010

The 707 did its most public work on January 25, 2010, 13 days after the earthquake. Travolta flew it from Florida into Port-au-Prince with six tons of ready-to-eat military rations and medical supplies, the AP reported, carrying doctors, Church of Scientology ministers, and his wife, Kelly Preston. He told the AP he could not see leaving the plane on the ground when it could help.

The rest of the hangar

The 707 was never the only airplane. Travolta told the AP in 2008 that he had owned 17 aircraft since getting his license. That summer he flew the 707 to the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture convention. His Eclipse 500, a small twin-engine jet, was there too, and he named a Gulfstream II as the third plane he kept at home.

Four years later Business Jet Traveler found a Bombardier Challenger 601 business jet he used for family trips, the Eclipse, a Soko Galeb, a Yugoslav military training jet, and two ultralights, and he said he had once owned a Vampire, an early British jet fighter.

In 2012 he announced he would give the Gulfstream II to the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame at the Museum of Aviation in Warner Robins, a gift in honor of his son Jett, who died in 2009, the AP reported.

What he flies today is harder to pin down. Fleet lists still circulate, Hola's in 2022 among them, that include the 707 he had given away five years earlier. We have not found a current list from an outlet we would cite.

The runway at home

Travolta told the AP in 2008 that being able to look out from the house and see his planes was all it took to make him happy.

The strip outside belongs to Jumbolair: a privately owned, private-use airfield whose asphalt runway the FAA's airport record lists at 7,380 feet long, about 1.4 miles of pavement. The FAA record dates the field to October 1980; the AP reported in 2005 that Arthur Jones, the inventor of Nautilus exercise machines, built the airstrip in 1984.

Whether that runway can take a 707 has twice ended up in court. In 2007 Travolta sued the airport's owners, the AP reported, claiming they had wrongly told the Federal Aviation Administration that the strip could not handle heavy aircraft. His trust's later complaint, as the Ocala Gazette described it, says that dispute was settled in 2008 on engineers' inspections supporting a 707. In January 2024 his trust sued the community's new developers over a weight limit on the runway, the Gazette reported. By then the plane had been sitting in a hangar in Georgia since 2019.

Gone to Australia

He announced the gift in 2017, and the plan was to fly it to Shellharbour Airport himself in November 2019. That autumn the jet went into a hangar in Brunswick, Georgia, for work under an airworthiness directive, a mandatory federal safety order, this one about the fittings that hold the four engines to the wings, Airline Ratings reported. He went to Australia anyway. In November 2019 he made a surprise visit to the museum at Albion Park and flew on its restored Lockheed Super Constellation, a 1950s propeller airliner.

Then the pandemic thinned the maintenance crews. After it, the museum found more corrosion and more mandatory safety orders, and Bob De La Hunty, its president and chief pilot, told the Illawarra Mercury that finishing the work in the United States would have taken about five more years and $5 million. A June 2025 post on the museum's social media, quoted by Region Illawarra, said the FAA had cleared it for a single flight to Georgia with no passengers aboard, but not for the flight to Australia.

So they took it apart.

The engines and one of the mounts that hold them to the wings reached the museum in June 2025, and the tail fin late that year. In March 2026 Worldwide Aircraft Recovery finished dismantling the rest at the Port of Brunswick, Vintage Aviation News reported, and the fuselage and wings sailed for Australia. They landed at Port Kembla in May and reached the museum at Albion Park on May 20.

On October 12, 2026, the Illawarra Mercury reported that the wings were due back on that week, with thousands of bolts to follow, then the landing gear, then the tail. The museum hopes to finish by Christmas. “It's a great big jigsaw puzzle at the moment,” De La Hunty said. ABC News reported on October 16 that the jet will taxi with visitors aboard but will not fly again, and that Travolta has said he will come back for the unveiling.