Near the end of his life, in December 1976, Elvis bought a sleek 1962 Lockheed JetStar. He barely got to use it. He sold it again the following spring, and that August he was gone. The plane he had owned for only a few months ended up parked at an airfield in Roswell, New Mexico.
And there it stayed. For about forty years the jet sat out in the desert, its velvet interior fading, the whole thing slowly coming apart under the sun and the wind.
Then in January 2023, on what would have been Elvis’s birthday, a YouTuber named Jimmy Webb bought it at auction for around two hundred thirty thousand dollars. When he hooked up power to the old jet, something wonderful happened. The lights flickered on. The television and the microwave still worked, after decades sitting dead in the desert.
Saving Elvis’s abandoned jet
Instead of restoring it to fly again, Webb did something a lot stranger. He had the wings taken off and the body of the jet bolted onto a motorhome chassis. Elvis’s plane became a drivable RV.
Driving Elvis’s jet as an RV
Then he drove it. More than sixteen hundred miles of open highway, all the way to a huge airshow in Wisconsin, with the old Elvis-style paint recreated down both sides.
Elvis’s jet-turned-RV at the airshow
Elvis never really got the time to enjoy this plane. Almost fifty years later, it’s finally doing something he probably would have loved. Rolling down the interstate, turning every single head it passes.