Did a Saudi Man “Accidently” Buy Two Planes for His Son’s Birthday?
Our timelines were flooded yesterday with news about a Saudi man who “accidentally” bought two planes as a gift for his son’s birthday! The news says that the father “accidentally” purchased two Airbus A350-1000s after searching for small scale models of the plane for his son.
The news added that the man’s lack of verbal clarity in English didn’t ease the communication between him and one of the biggest aerospace companies in the world. They even quoted the man saying “I got lost in currency conversions, I thought it was a bit expensive but still reasonable” after he was presented with the price of $365m!
Although the piece of news was published on very big news outlets, the news is far from the truth. The news was published on an aviation-based satire website called Thin Air Today and went super-viral since then. A quick online search will reveal that the website actually writes only satire stories around current happenings in the world of aviation.
News outlets didn’t take the time to check if their source is an actual website or a satirical one. They just loved to further promote the negative stereotype of rich Arab men of the Gulf who buy everything with their oil money.
