What’s Happening With John Travolta’s Boeing 707?

Movie legend and aviation nut John Travolta has for many years owned and flown his own aircraft. The pride of his fleet was always a classic Boeing 707-100 model, with his own personalised tail number and the vintage livery of Australian national carrier Qantas.

However, this aircraft has not flown nor been seen by many for a number of years, despite various plans being reported for bringing it back to flight.

So what is happening? Here’s what we’ve found out…

A History of John Travolta’s Boeing 707

John Travolta’s aircraft is a Boeing 707-138B model with tail number N707JT.

It was built in 1964 and originally flew for Qantas as VH-EBM – hence the classic livery worn today.

It later flew for Braniff International as N108BN from 1969 and TAG Aviation as N707XX from 1975.

John bought the aircraft in 1998 and has used it for flying himself and his family around. Given its history with Qantas, it has been used for corporate promotions with the airline since being painted in the airline’s V-Jet livery in 2002, and John has been an ambassador with them for many years.

In fact, the 707-138B variant was designed specifically for Qantas, featuring a shorter fuselage than the standard -100 model, and it would operate on the famous Kangaroo and Southern Cross routes between Australia and London in particular.

Briefly, the aircraft also wore classic Pan Am livery to appear in a TV programme.

Recent Years

N707JT parked up. Photo (c) CAHairyBear

N707JT was grounded pending essential works around 2017, and stored at Brunswick, GA. Around this time John Travolta donated the aircraft to the Historical Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) which is based in Australia and was interested in relocating it to their base at Albion Park near Sydney.

However, despite plans to restore the aircraft to flying condition and fly it to Australia, this work has been found to be too expensive and difficult to achieve.

Recent photographs from the hangar in which the aircraft is located have shown that disassembly has begun, with the tail removed. Once this has been completed, it is likely the aircraft will begin the long journey to Australia by sea, and ultimately reassembled as a static museum piece.

But could it be restored to flight again? HARS has a reputation for doing this with other historic aircraft, but in this case it might be too difficult.

They said on their Facebook page:

Despite all our efforts, doing the required maintenance on site has proved to be not practical and so once it arrives at the museum it will be put back together and maintained by our engineers here. Will it be airworthy once again? We will just have to see how far we can go.

Only time will tell!

Did you ever see John Travolta’s Boeing 707? Did you ever fly on a Qantas 707-138B? Leave a comment below!

Title image: Jerome