Your business aviation hot takes, served fresh.

July 29th, 2026 | Season 3 Episode 29 Companion

Good morning and welcome back to the VIP Seat. This week we are covering flyExclusive's record month and what it does and does not tell us, the NTSB docket pointing to birds in the Hudson River helicopter crash, Saudi Arabia's helicopter operator signing for up to 60 Bombardier jets, another Falcon 10X delay, the FAA's new digital clearance tool, and the cargo carve out fight coming back around. Sit back, buckle up, and let's take off.

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The Scoop: flyExclusive says it set company records in June, reporting more than 4,000 flights and over 7,000 flight hours in the month, according to a company release covered by Private Jet Card Comparisons. The company also reported that average Jet Club funding reached roughly $190,000, nearly double the program's $100,000 minimum deposit, and that new customer deposits were up about 32 percent year over year. flyExclusive cited a net promoter score of 86. The Kinston, North Carolina based operator relaunched its jet card as Jet Club 2026 in April, removing the $1,000 per month membership fee, eliminating standard taxi time charges, and locking member rates for 24 months from the date of deposit. In its most recent quarter, the company reported revenue of $96.4 million, up roughly 9 percent year over year on 18,537 flight hours, along with positive adjusted EBITDA for the second consecutive quarter. Second quarter results have not yet been released.

Our Take: What follows is speculation and not financial advice. Earnings are expected in the coming weeks, and when a public company pushes operating numbers out ahead of a print, it usually means one of two things: the plan is working and they want you to see it early, or the print is going to be softer than the story and they want something positive in the record first. We do not know which one this is. We do know that growth is good, and this looks like growth.

Here is what the headline numbers cannot tell you. A $190,000 average deposit is cash today and a flying obligation tomorrow, and the deferred liability that comes with big prepaid cards has always been the industry's real rub. You have to have the capacity and the balance sheet to serve those hours later. The hours number is cumulative across the whole platform, while the deposit number is retail, so please do not read the two as one. Retail carries better margin but also a heavier go to market cost, and dropping a membership fee removes revenue that was effectively 100 percent gross margin. None of that makes this a bad month. It just means the earnings release, not the press release, is where the pull through shows up. Earmark this one, loyal listeners, and remind us to revisit it when the quarter drops.

Read More: Private Jet Card Comparisons

The Scoop: The NTSB has released more than 2,000 pages of investigative material on the April 10, 2025 crash of a Bell 206 sightseeing helicopter into the Hudson River, which killed all six people on board, including the pilot and a family of five. The documents do not state a probable cause, which will come in the final report, but they describe evidence consistent with multiple bird strikes before the aircraft broke apart. The Smithsonian Institution's Feather Identification Lab identified remains from more than one species of goose on the wreckage, including a female Canada goose, a bird that averages close to eight pounds, with evidence found on the main rotor blades and the left horizontal stabilizer. Witnesses told investigators they saw large flocks of birds in the area immediately before the breakup. The FAA has said helicopters are especially vulnerable to bird strikes because they operate at low altitude. Separately, in April 2025 the FAA issued an emergency order suspending the operator's air carrier certificate after the company's director of operations, who had agreed by email to a voluntary pause in flying, was terminated 16 minutes later. The agency's order stated it appeared the firing was retaliation for a safety decision and that the company therefore lacked required qualified management personnel under 14 CFR 119.69.

Our Take: The thing we keep coming back to is how confident everyone was in the first 48 hours. The video was shocking, the rotor separated, and the internet immediately settled on maintenance. Now the docket is out, and the evidence points somewhere very different. That is the whole argument against speculating before the reports land, and we are including ourselves in that.

On the management side, the lesson is not complicated. A director of operations who says “let's stand down and figure out what happened” is doing the job. Yet, the DO was fired 15 minutes after ordering the safety stand down If you run an operation, there’s a lesson here to have safety at the forefront and to take care of your people in the wake of an accident. Default to safety and sort the rest out after.

Read More: AP News

The Scoop: The Helicopter Company, a Public Investment Fund portfolio company and Saudi Arabia's largest commercial helicopter operator, signed a letter of intent with Bombardier at the Farnborough International Airshow toward a firm order for 12 aircraft: five Challenger 3500s, five Global 5500s, and two Global 8000s, with purchase options for 48 more across the same three platforms. Bloomberg, as cited by AGBI, put the value of the firm tranche at roughly $570 million at list price. THC said the move marks its entry into fixed wing business aviation for jet charter and management, driven by demand tied to Saudi Arabia's expanding tourism sector and Vision 2030. THC was founded in 2018, and the company has separately committed to additional Airbus helicopters as it grows its rotary fleet. The signing was attended by THC CEO Captain Arnaud Martinez, PIF head of aviation and security Muhammad Ovais Yousuf, and Bombardier CEO Éric Martel and chairman Pierre Beaudoin.

Our Take: Bombardier is having a year. Between the large unattributed fleet order earlier in 2025 that turned out to be BOND, additional fractional commitments, and now this, the order book is stacking up in a way that will be worth revisiting at the end of the cycle. And note that when the mystery order landed, a lot of us guessed the Saudis. Turns out that instinct was not wrong, just early.

The part we find more interesting is the infrastructure. All those Bombardier MRO announcements in the Middle East over the past few years raised an obvious question: in the United States you can point to the big anchor customer, so who is it over there? This looks like at least part of the answer. If the options get exercised anywhere near proportionally, you are talking about roughly 20 Challenger 3500s, 20 Global 5500s, and eight Global 8000s, which is a fleet that competes with Vista rather than with the domestic fractional players. Sovereign wealth is about as patient as capital gets, so this is a long runway. Our only complaint is that they announced it by press release instead of saving it for NBAA. If you are going to order 60 airplanes, give us a show (preferably with Cirque de Soleil Dancers or similar).

Read More: Corporate Jet Investor

The Scoop: Dassault Aviation has pushed entry into service for the Falcon 10X from late 2027 to the second half of 2029, the program's second major delay. CEO Eric Trappier disclosed the revised timeline alongside the company's half year results on July 22, attributing it to a more complicated certification environment in the wake of the Boeing 737 Max accidents in 2018 and 2019. Trappier noted the 10X is a clean sheet design subject to certification rules that did not apply to the Falcon 6X, which was approved in 2023, and said Dassault now estimates roughly two and a half years between first flight and certification. The 7,500 nautical mile, Rolls-Royce Pearl 10X powered twinjet was launched in 2021 with an initial service entry target of 2025. First flight took place on June 19, 2026, and a second test aircraft is nearing completion at Mérignac. Dassault reported 23 Falcon orders in the first half of 2026 against eight in the same period a year earlier, with backlog at 83 aircraft, while noting continued supplier delays.

Our Take: We will give Dassault partial credit here. The 10X really is a clean sheet airplane, and the G700 and G800 carried over more from prior generations than the marketing suggested. New airframe, new rules, longer road. That part is fair.

Where we are less convinced is the framing. Bombardier and Gulfstream have both moved new aircraft through certification in this same post Max environment, so pointing at the regulatory climate only explains so much. We also suspect there is a resourcing story underneath this one. Farnborough made it pretty clear that the entire European aerospace complex has tilted toward defense, and Dassault has a fighter line with a lot of demand behind it right now. When two and a half years from first flight to certification is the plan, and first flight happened last month, 2029 is not a surprise so much as an acknowledgment. The order book is up sharply, which tells you customers are not walking.

Read More: AIN Online

The Scoop: The FAA unveiled a new tool called Mobile Clearance at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, allowing general and business aviation pilots to request IFR departure clearances through approved flight applications rather than by radio or phone. The agency said the capability works through ForeFlight and Garmin apps on a phone or tablet, and is intended to reduce read back errors and free controllers to focus on aircraft movement and runway safety. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford described it as a simple improvement built on technology pilots already use daily. Beginning in August, the tool will also let pilots cancel IFR through their flight apps. The FAA began operational evaluations in Houston in May and expanded testing this summer to Appleton International Airport in Wisconsin and New Century AirCenter in Kansas, with Kansas City, Nashville, and Austin planned for this fall ahead of nationwide deployment beginning in 2027.

Our Take: Our first reaction was the same one we have to most FAA technology news: this is great. Why are we just now getting this tech, though?! It’s basically skipping the step of writing down your clearance and reading it back and putting it where everyone was putting it before… in Foreflight.

Here is the number that surprised us when we went looking. Over a three month stretch in 2025, roughly 3,689 GA aircraft used en route CPDLC compared with about 3,473 mainline operators, which means business aviation is using datalink more than the airlines are. So this is not the FAA doing GA a favor, it is technology cascading down to where it is already being used hardest. Does Mobile Clearance make CPDLC less necessary domestically? Probably a little, though we would still take the installed avionics over the tablet when it matters. A hundred thousand plus dollar Honeywell box and a $1,000 iPad are not the same redundancy story.

Read More: AVweb

The Scoop: The Independent Pilots Association has renewed its push to end what is known as the cargo “carve out”, the exclusion of all cargo pilots from the science based fatigue rules the FAA adopted for passenger airlines under FAR Part 117 in 2011. Cargo operators continue to fly under older flight, duty, and rest limits. The IPA is campaigning in support of H.R. 7526, the Safe Skies Act of 2026, which would extend Part 117 flight duty, rest, and fatigue protections to all cargo pilots. The union's argument is that cargo crews operate overnight during the body's most fatigue sensitive hours, in the same airspace and at the same airports as passenger carriers, and that fatigue risk does not change based on whether the payload is passengers or packages. The bill has not advanced since it was introduced earlier this year.

Our Take: A listener sent this one in and asked what we thought, so here it is. We have skin in this game: one of us spent two years on the FAA aviation rulemaking committee that looked at rest and duty, alongside cargo carriers, airlines, fatigue researchers and the NetJets pilot association, and that group produced recommendations that most of the room signed off on. Those conversations were not friendly. They were also productive. The recommendations exist. Somebody should read them.

On the substance, we do not think this is a binary between Part 117 and the status quo. Part 117 is overly restrictive for Part 135 operators of every size. It requires a table to figure out where you stand in a duty period, which is unworkable for a small or single pilot operation, and it penalizes overnight flying specifically, which is the entire cargo business model. The better answer is a spectrum. Build a real fatigue risk management system with the data and the monitoring behind it, and you earn more flexibility. Run a simpler operation, and you live inside tighter, more prescriptive limits. More capability, more room, but you have to prove you can do it safely. That framework serves safety better than either extreme, and it is already written down. Secretary Duffy, if that report is still sitting on a shelf somewhere in the middle of an office move, it is worth finding.

Read More: Independent Pilots Association

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Chad Goes to Nantucket

The finance bro satire accounts have been eating well this summer, and this week's standout is a bit following a character named Chad on a Nantucket run, complete with a wrong FBO, a PC-12 out the window, and a peptide regimen at altitude. We laughed harder than we should have. The reason these land is that they are clearly satire, which is more than we can say for a few real accounts in this industry that read exactly the same way and mean every word of it. Also, aircraft detailer influencer guy, wherever you went, some of us miss you and some of us very much do not.

Kevin LaRosa's Praetor Air to Air

If you want the opposite of that, go find the air to air footage of a Praetor 500 and 600 shot by Kevin LaRosa, flown from a camera equipped Phenom 300 that also worked on Top Gun. Snow capped peaks, perfect light, and one of the prettiest sequences we have seen this year. Consider this your permission slip for a late night scroll down that rabbit hole.

Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/k2larosa

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Jessie's Links:
Private Aviation Safety Alliance
FlyVizor
LinkedIn

Preston's Links:
Prestige Aircraft Finance
Private Jet Insider (Newsletter)
LinkedIn
X (Formerly Known as Twitter)
FastJets

Disclaimer: The VIP Seat Weekly is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Coverage of publicly traded companies reflects the personal opinions of the hosts and does not constitute investment, financial, tax, or legal advice, nor a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. The hosts are not registered investment advisors and may hold positions in companies discussed. All investments carry risk. Readers should conduct their own research and consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decision.