King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands flew himself to a highly contentious State Visit in Kenya earlier this week aboard a government Boeing 737, it has been revealed after he was spotted sitting in the First Officer’s seat in the cockpit as the plane touched down in Nairobi.
The Dutch monarch is an aviation enthusiast and has been flying for nearly four decades after he obtained his Private Pilot’s Licence in 1985.
King Willem-Alexander’s relationship with Kenya can be traced back to his flying career, having flown around the country as a volunteer and then for the Kenya Wildlife Service in the late 1980s.
His extreme love of flying was, however, only truly revealed in 2017 when the King made public the fact that he had regularly flown as a commercial pilot for KLM Cityhopper, the regional subsidiary of the Dutch national airline.
Officially, King Willem-Alexander was known as a ‘guest pilot,’ flying the airline’s Fokker 70 aircraft or, on occasion, a government airplane of the same type.
In 2017, however, King Willem-Alexander decided to retrain to pilot the Boeing 737, which coincided with KLM’s decision to retire its Fokker fleet and start flying the American-made jet.
The Royal Household denied claims that King Willem-Alexander’s move to the Boeing 737 had no bearing on the Dutch government’s decision to replace the country’s international government plane with a Boeing 737 Business Jet.
On Tuesday, King Willem-Alexander flew the government jet (with the appropriately named registration PH-GOV) from the Netherlands to Kenya to start a State Visit that has put human rights abuses in the country in the spotlight.
The King was seen concentrating as he taxied the plane to its parking spot before sharing a few words with the Captain and then descending the airstairs with Queen Máxima.
Now aged 57, the King once told a Dutch newspaper that passengers onboard the KLM Cityhopper flights he piloted rarely realized that he was at the controls of the plane, even when he made an announcement on the public address system.
Things were, however, a little different before cockpit security was dramatically tightened during the early 2000’s.
“Before September 11, the cockpit door was open,” the King explained. “People regularly came to have a look and thought it was nice or surprising that I was sitting there.”
