The bizarre case of General Electric’s use of a second corporate jet to follow its former chief executive, Jeff Immelt, as he hopscotched around the globe seems such an outlandish waste of money that many reacted with disbelief after The Wall Street Journal reported it on Oct. 18.

“I literally felt sick to my stomach,” Scott Davis, an analyst and founding partner of Melius Research who has covered G.E. for years, told me this week. “I immediately called the company and asked if this could possibly be true.”

Mr. Davis said G.E. had told him that the issue had been “blown all out of proportion.” Publicly, the company said that the two-plane arrangement had been used only on “limited occasions” and was halted by Mr. Immelt in 2014.

That response prompted The Journal to report this week that the second jet — known in aviation circles as a “chase plane” — had followed Mr. Immelt’s aircraft as recently as March, when two G.E. jets flew to Anchorage after taking off from Boston within minutes of each other. The second plane stayed in Alaska for five days while Mr. Immelt went on to South Korea and China. After he returned to Anchorage, the plane followed him back to Boston.