It’s almost been a week since one of the most wanted men in the world was bundled onto a jet to face justice in his native Ireland. Accused mob boss Daniel Kinahan’s ground-breaking arrest came after years of hard work by the Gardai sent shockwaves through Europe as revelations continue to emerge.
The price paid for the 49-year-old’s extradition from the United Arab Emirates is the latest detail. The Irish Air Corps’ Dassault Falcon 6X jet flew the 12,000km round trip to bring Kinahan home from Dubai, insiders have said the trip is estimated to have cost Ireland’s Department of Defence around €110,000.
But they also said that the cost of last week’s flight is around half the price of what the state would have had to fork out it if it had hired a private jet for the same trip. “If we didn’t have the Falcon and had to hire an air taxi for the mission, you are talking north of €200,000,” a source told the Irish Mirror.
Aviation insiders said the cost of flying a high tech jet like the Falcon – is calculated on a per hour flight basis. They said the total cost per hour, for everything from jet fuel to paying the salaries of the Air Corps crew on board, is about $8,000 – or €6,930.
The flight from the Air Corps HQ at Casement Aerodrome in Baldonnel, south Dublin to Dubai and back lasted 16 hours. The jet flew out at 10.30am on Saturday and landed back in Baldonnel at 6.30pm on Sunday, 32 hours later – and Kinahan was then arrested and brought to the Special Criminal Court in Dublin to face a charge of directing a crime gang. He was later charged and remanded to Portlaoise Prison in Co Laois.
Each leg of the Air Corps mission was eight hours, or 16 hours all in and the rest of the time the crew and gardai on board were resting between flights. That means the total cost of the return flight was €110,896.
The source said the cost did not include the expense incurred sending a small number of gardai from the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau on the flight, as well as accommodation costs for them and the Air Corps crew on Saturday night – but that is believed to be less than €5,000.
Nor did it include the massive Garda operation that saw members of the Emergency Response Unit and Armed Support Unit involved in getting Kinahan from Baldonnel to the CCJ and then on to Portlaoise Prison after his appearance. That is likely to have cost tens of thousands of euro.
The mission was the most high profile flight of the 6X – known as the Government Jet but technically called the Air Corps strategic reach aircraft – since it was added to the Air Corps fleet in December last year after it was bought for a cool €53 million. Crews spent several months acclimatising to the plane before its first official mission in March.
The state of the art Falcon 6X is normally used to ferry around VIPs like President Catherine Connolly and Taoiseach Micheal Martin, but it can carry out a number of other missions – such as the high risk repatriation of Kinahan, 49, alleged to be the leader of the €1.5 billion drugs and crime cartel.
Other options for the jet include transporting members of the Army Ranger Wing to important missions overseas, logistics flights, the emergency evacuation of Irish citizens in trouble spots abroad – and even air ambulance taskings for seriously ill patients.
The 14-passenger jet came into service in March – and before that the State had spent hundreds of thousands of euro on chartering private planes to transport senior politicians around the world.
The Air Corps previously used a Gulfstream IV as the government jet, but that was retired in 2014. It then started using the smaller Learjet 45 for ministerial transport, but it came into service in 2004 and was deemed no longer reliable in around 2021. That meant the State had to start hiring private jets for ministerial flights – at a massive cost.
Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence Helen McEntee told the Dail in April that the State had spent €3.2 million in the previous five years on hiring private jets. That included a trip for then Tánaiste and current Taoiseach Micheal Martin to Egypt and Israel in November 2023.
Mr Martin told the Dail the following month that the private plane for him and one of his staff cost some €158,000. Sources tell us an equivalent plane would have had to be hired to bring Kinahan back to Ireland if the Falcon 6X was not in service and it would now probably have cost some €200,000.
Records show that from March, when the Falcon 6X started flying missions, to July, the aircraft flew senior politicians on 30 occasions.
The first operational flight for the jet was to take Taoiseach Michel Martin to Madrid and back on March 10 for a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
Some 13 of the 30 ministerial flights were for Mr Martin. Other flights catered for Tánaiste Simon Harris, Minister for Defence and Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee and Minister for Children Norma Foley among others.