✈️ The VIP Seat Weekly

Your business aviation hot takes, served fresh

🎄 Year-End Special Edition | December 30, 2025 | Season 2 Finale

Welcome to Our 2025 Year in Review

Not much news this week… everyone's on holiday and the industry is taking a breather. So we decided to do something different for our season finale: we're looking back at the biggest trends, winners, losers, and making our predictions for what's coming in 2026.

Below you'll find our takes, organized head-to-head. Some we agree on, some we don't. That's what makes this fun.

As always, we want to hear from you. Hit reply and tell us: what did we get right? What did we miss? And what are YOUR predictions for 2026?

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📈 BIGGEST TREND OF 2025

Jessie's Pick: FAA Transformation & Safety Infrastructure

The tragic DCA crash became a catalyst for real change at the FAA this year. Congress passed major legislation to modernize the ATC system. We covered the $12.5 billion ATC overhaul extensively… 4,600+ sites getting upgraded, new fiber-optic infrastructure, and the first new air route traffic control centers in 60 years.

But it's not just ATC. We saw movement on pilot mental health (the stabilization period cut from six months to three months), EMAS systems being installed at more airports, and new runway safety technology to combat incursions. Infrastructure investments we haven't seen since the post-WWII era are finally happening.

Jessie's Take: "The FAA shouldn't be partisan. After the DCA crash and everything else this year, hopefully everyone sees we need to come together on this one."

Preston's Pick: Big Dollar Amounts Rule Everything

Follow the money. This year, the big players won—and everyone else got squeezed out.

Look at the M&A activity: Bond raised a bunch of money before they even have aircraft. Flyhouse acquired SunAir Jets and keeps raising capital we can't even quantify. Wheels Up did that sale-leaseback last week (expensive). Meanwhile, lower middle market M&A? I can count the deals on one hand: Van Allen, Levitate, Priester.

Family office money isn't flowing like it was two or three years ago. Seed capital for small aviation ventures? Hard to come by. The dry powder is there… private equity has been sitting on investment money for years… but they're only going after the big players.

Preston's Take: "The market is screaming that scale matters. If you're not big enough to attract institutional capital, you're going to struggle to compete."

🏆 BIGGEST WINNER OF 2025

Jessie's Pick: Aircraft Sales & Bonus Depreciation

The most psychotic end-of-year market we've seen in years. When bonus depreciation passed, the floodgates opened.

Early November, the pulse check across the industry was "it's been fine, not great." Then the second week of December hit and the market seemed to go absolutely bonkers.

Pre-buy facilities that were begging for business in late November, then were suddenly slammed.

Jessie's Take: "To all the spouses and kids who missed their family members this holiday season… it was kind of justified. Forgive them. It was cray out there."

Preston's Pick: Fractional Providers

Fractional is the only sector that turned up instead of down through the post-COVID pullback. Everyone else retreated; fractional kept growing.

Bond enters the market as a new player. Air Share transacted and is fueling growth—they were lead sponsor at the Ryder Cup and US Open. FlexJet made the Honeywell move (we covered that extensively). CSX shuttered its 84-year-old flight department and went fractional. Order books are growing across the board.

The model just works. Lowest cost of capital, most efficient use of aircraft, path of least resistance if you have the deep pockets or experience to execute it. Even the smaller regional players like Jet Out, Plane Sense, and Air Share who grew organically are winning… they just had to stay disciplined and say no to customers along the way.

Preston's Take: "If you have the capital, fractional is the path of least resistance for aircraft operations. You finance the aircraft, operate it, and charge on top… it's the most efficient use of capital in aviation."

📉 BIGGEST LOSER OF 2025

Jessie's Pick: OEMs Take a PR Beating

Something shifted this year. It used to be taboo to publicly call out your OEM. Remember when Glenn Gonzalez at Jet It went after HondaJet? He got destroyed for it.

Then Kenn Ricci at CJI Miami started calling out the engine programs, ramping it up with the Flexjet-Honeywell lawsuit. And suddenly it became acceptable to air grievances publicly. Kenn really kicked it off.

The tide has shifted. Operators are no longer afraid to air out their grievances with MSP programs, parts availability, and service backlogs. Whether it's 18-month engine waits or warranty disputes, OEMs are getting called out on social media and at industry events in ways we've never seen before.

Jessie's Take: "Did we not give Glenn enough credit? Different time now, for sure. But Kenn has empowered people to go public with their complaints."

Preston's Pick: Charter Operators Getting Squeezed

Owned-and-operated charter companies are getting hit from every direction.

Cost of capital: Very few traditional lenders will touch charter operators. Financing is expensive and hard to find.

Platform erosion: Legacy aircraft are going defunct. Beechjet windshield issues. Learjet landing gear problems that the FAA won't mandate fixes for. GIV engine programs expiring. Falcon 900s with no more avionics screens. Operators who said "we'll just go older and older" are needing to modernize their fleet, yet capital is hard to come by.

Market pressure: Charter is the most cyclical segment, and it hasn't been great this year on a macro level. Meanwhile, they can't pass costs onto consumers nearly as efficiently as fractional providers can. The charter customer is incredibly price-sensitive AND has very little loyalty.

Preston's Take: "Aircraft values went bonkers, pilot and mechanic costs are through the roof, private equity bought up FBOs and raised fuel prices and rents. The squeeze is happening from all directions. Unless you can pass all of that onto the consumer, like you can with fractional, it could mean trouble."

🔮 PREDICTIONS FOR 2026

Jessie's Pick: AI Disrupts Aviation Software

AI has been the quiet revolution happening in the background.

The speed at which software is now being developed, coded, and shipped has fundamentally changed. Charter companies could build their own systems using AI today, quickly and cheaply. We're seeing operators hire "heads of technology.”

Every operator is either building their own tools or hacking together AI solutions on top of their existing platforms. The software companies with the biggest moats are those with regulatory capture, like maintenance tracking systems required for FAA reporting. Everything else below that? Might get taken out in house.

Jessie's Take: "I don't think you're going to be using software in the future. All your data will be uploaded and everyone will just interact with a bot or chat feature. Way more human and interactive than plugging information into fields."

Preston's Pick: Middle Market Gets Eroded and a Big M&A Year Coming

The silver tsunami hasn't fully played out yet. Look at operator leadership, charter company management, aircraft sales principals… we're still about halfway or less through that generational transition.

Prediction: 2026 becomes a breakout year for M&A. Here's why:

1. Interest rates should come down, which means speculative capital returns seeking yield

2. Private aviation becomes more attractive as cost of debt decreases

3. High-quality medium-sized firms get acquired or grow into major players

4. Low-quality medium-sized firms get left behind and shrink

Scale matters more than ever in this business. You need buying power. You need operational efficiencies. The cost of aircraft, fuel, pilots, and training keeps climbing and you have to achieve scale to make the economics work.

I've heard about several transactions percolating in the background. The recipe for a bang-out M&A season is coming together.

Preston's Take: "The high-quality mid-sized firms either get bought up or they grow into one of the big players. The bad ones get left in obscurity. We're becoming a scale-matters industry."

🌶️ Spicy LinkedIn Drama of the Week

Even during the holidays, the keyboards stay hot.

Jim Atkinson vs. The Entire 135 Industry: A 121 pilot posted a year-old Vanity Fair article claiming Part 135 flying is "wildly less safe" than commercial aviation. The industry piled on. Nathan Winkle called it "the single most uninformed misleading post ever posted on LinkedIn." Jessie went in personally. The data is clear: dual-pilot, professional crew Part 135 operations are statistically about as safe as commercial aviation. Driving to the airport is more dangerous than flying charter.

Jordan Brown Warrant Drama: David Gitman of Monarch Air Group posted about an arrest warrant issued for Jordan Brown in Palm Beach County. Jordan himself hopped in the comments. It got messy.

See You Next Season!

We’re not stopping… we’ll keep bringing you the top 5 stories in Business Aviation so that you can be more informed about what’s going on in the industry. We look forward to many new friends, new events, partners, and of course hot takes in 2026. May you and your family have a wonderful new year celebration, and lets all make 2026 the best year yet!

🎧 This Week's Episode

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The VIP Seat Weekly is the companion newsletter to The VIP Seat podcast. We give you the business aviation hot takes for your commute.

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)
Jetting