Pastors and Planes – October

Private planes used by ministries logged 401 flights and $1.66M in operating costs last month.

MinistryWatch, in collaboration with the Trinity Foundation, each month publishes a list of the private planes belonging to pastors and Christian ministries.

The list also includes basic information about their usage by pastors and ministries.

Photo by Ramon Kagie / Unsplash

This month’s list is below. Here are a few highlights:

• The Trinity Foundation currently tracks 56 planes owned by more than 40 ministries.
• During October, these planes made a total of 401 flights. That’s up from September, which saw 316 flights, but the same number of flights as August.
• Operating costs were approximately $1.66 million for the month — up from September, which was $1.16 million, and August, which was $1.54 million.
• In October, Liberty University once again took the spot of top user of private aircraft for the eighth time this year, racking up an estimated $374,7000 in flight operating costs. That’s more than double the next highest user for the month.
• In second was Samaritan’s Purse with $155,300 in flight operating costs, followed by Assemblies of God  with $116,900.
• Other notable users of private aircraft include Revival Today/Jonathan Shuttlesworth ($102,700), Keith Craft ($102,600), Eagle Mountain Church ($98,870), Edir Macedo ($93,950), and Jesse Duplantis ($92,400).

A note from Barry Bowen of the Trinity Foundation on “Long Distance Ministry”:

The tracking maps of Pastor Planes often show flights involving Long Distance Ministry, in which pastors travel between multi-site campuses hundreds and sometimes over a thousand miles apart.

Fred Price, founder of the megachurch Crenshaw Christian Center, died in 2021. Part of his legacy was popularizing the practice of Long Distance Ministry.

In 2007, Business Jet Traveler interviewed Price about his church’s use of a Gulfstream G-II jet and asked, “How much do you fly for the church?” Price responded, “A couple of years back, when we were first establishing the church in New York, my wife and I flew every single week-52 weeks-Los Angeles to New York and return. Now the least we’d go is once a month and recently we’ve had to go twice a month.”

Pastors Ron Carpenter, Jentezen Franklin, Keith Moore, and Jonathan Shuttlesworth are all practitioners of Long Distance Ministry.

Shuttlesworth leads the ministry Revival Today, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Revival Today also has churches in Arizona, California, Texas and Canada. Shuttlesworth frequently posts on social media pictures of himself outside charter jets he uses to fly between the different congregations.

An October 1 Shuttlesworth Instagram post features a picture of himself standing in front of a Gulfstream jet with the tail number N71TV. “New plane for a few weeks… others getting fixed. Gulfstream IV. Heading to Pittsburgh right now. Love you Minnesota… thank you for being SO NICE!”

Preaching regularly in different states is expensive. In 2024, Revival Today spent $7,411,238 on travel expenses, according to the ministry’s Form 990.

It is important to note that some Christian ministries—especially disaster relief and missionary organizations—have legitimate uses for airplanes, but the planes they’re using are not luxury jets that can go literally around the world at nearly the speed of sound. We have not included these cargo planes on this list.

If you find this information interesting or helpful, you might want to follow The Trinity Foundation’s daily X feed. You can find that account, @PastorPlanes, here.) But we think that for most people this monthly list will be more digestible and easier to read.

It’s important to name a couple of caveats regarding this list:

• Estimating operating costs is, at best, a rough art. Fuel costs vary widely and are constantly changing. Fixed costs per hour vary depending on the amount of time in the air. We used a variety of publicly available sources to arrive at the operating costs lists, using the assumption that the plane would fly 200 hours per year.
• A takeoff and landing is considered one flight. Half flights usually indicate an overnight flight in which the plane took off at the end of one month and landed on the first day of the next month.
• We can’t be sure who is using these planes, or for what purpose. It’s possible that the ministries are leasing or chartering the flights to others to generate income. However, if that’s the case, the ministry would normally have to declare that income as “unrelated business income.” We can find no evidence that any of these ministries are doing that, though it’s also important to note that most of the ministries on this list do not file Form 990s.

It’s also important to note that this list does not include ministries who use “fractional ownership” services such as NetJets. Neither does this list indicate if the aircraft is for ministry or personal use. Using ministry resources for personal use is not strictly prohibited by IRS regulations, but the use of the aircraft would have to be counted as income. The IRS almost never investigates tax-exempt organizations. Of the nearly 2-million tax-exempt organizations in the country, less than 10,000 get audited each year—that’s one-tenth of 1%.  And the number audited in many years is closer to 5,000.

MinistryWatch considers the use of private aircraft for the transportation of executives and staff to be excessive. It should be a significant red flag for donors. To see other warning signs donors should heed before donating to a ministry, click here.