Your business aviation hot takes, served fresh.

October 7th, 2026 | Season 3 Episode 40 Companion

Good morning and welcome back to the VIP Seat. This week a catheter company becomes a private jet company, an air ambulance is lost on the Bermuda to Boston run, fifteen states take the FAA to court over delivery drones, Kissimmee swaps ADS-B billing for cameras, and Global Jet Capital says a $247 billion market is getting heavier. Sit back, buckle up, and let's take off.

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The Scoop: Flyte Aviation began trading on the NYSE American under the ticker VJET on October 5, after Catheter Precision changed its corporate name to Flyte Aviation and retired its old VTAK ticker, according to the company's press release. Per the company's SEC filings, Catheter Precision agreed in February to acquire 19.98% of Fly Flyte, Inc., then acquired the remaining 80.02% in March, including Part 135 operator Ponderosa Air, LLC. A September 8-K disclosed a 1-for-10 reverse stock split effective alongside the name change. The company says it operates a growing fleet of Cirrus Vision Jets and is building an AI-driven booking platform aimed at what it cites as an $11.6 billion U.S. charter market. It will keep two business segments, cardiac electrophysiology and private aviation, and says its life sciences business will not be downsized. The release's own risk factors include the aviation business's limited operating history, a history of losses, and a potential need for additional capital. Flyte previously operated under the Flewber brand.

Our Take: Quick word association game:

Vision Jets,

Part 135 instant booking,

and catheters.

If you guessed one public company now does all three, congratulations. Public companies pairing businesses that do not obviously belong together is becoming a theme. You can draw a line between jet engines and power generation. Having a harder time picturing the boardroom where an instant booking app was the answer to selling more catheters. Organ transport, sure. Cardiac electrophysiology, less so. We also would not ring the M&A gong (sponsored by Oshman Aviation) on this one, since it is less two like businesses combining and more one company that was public and one that wanted to be.

The press release leans on "fragmented market," every investor's favorite phrase, and the idea that technology will finally fix private aviation. We have heard that pitch before. In a 2022 Forbes column, Doug Gollan wrote that Flewber was not the Uber of private jets, and the company's CEO at the time described its automation largely by way of a whiteboard "the size of 39th Street." We would rather see the workflow than hear about the whiteboard.

To be fair, there is a strategy here we can get behind. Keeping owned Vision Jets geographically dense in the Northeast, leaning into routes like Nantucket, and chartering out everything else may be how very light jets actually make money. But the public markets have not been kind to our industry, which is complex and hard to explain in a quarterly call. We wish them well, and welcome to the earnings roundup. As with any operator, if you are evaluating Ponderosa Air, do your homework, and the Private Aviation Safety Alliance is a good place to start.

Read More: Yahoo Finance (GlobeNewswire)

The Scoop: A Gulfstream G100 air ambulance operated by Ontario-based Latitude Air Ambulance went down south of Nantucket early on October 3 while flying from Bermuda's L.F. Wade International Airport to Boston Logan, according to multiple reports. Six people were aboard: four Canadian crew members, two pilots and two medical staff, plus a patient from Bermuda and her son, who was traveling as her family escort. According to the Coast Guard, the crew reported electrical difficulties while approaching the Boston area, the aircraft then descended rapidly, and contact with air traffic control was lost. A civilian vessel later found debris associated with the aircraft, and Latitude has said all six are presumed dead. The aircraft, registered C-GRJP, was built in 1996 and had been registered to Latitude since 2018, per Air Data News. No cause has been determined.

Our Take: Our hearts go out to the families of all six people aboard, and to the medevac community, which lost colleagues doing the work of getting a patient to care.

What we can offer is context on the route. Bermuda looks like a short short on a map, roughly two hours from the East Coast, but it is a long stretch over open water to a single runway. Many aircraft that fly there cannot make the round trip without fuel, so crews are committing to a decision point. Jessie flew the route regularly in a Phenom 300 earlier in her career, and pilots took it seriously. The G100 has the range for this mission, and from what has been reported, this was a route this ^{operator flew often.}

Finding answers will be difficult. An ocean debris field is churned by water, and it is not yet clear how much recorded data will be recoverable. This one may take a long time to understand.

Read More: AP News

The Scoop: Fifteen states, along with Harris County, Texas, have filed a petition challenging the FAA's environmental review of commercial drone package delivery, according to Aviation Week. In July, the FAA concluded in a programmatic environmental assessment that operator mitigation measures meant drone operations would not significantly affect the human environment, so a full environmental impact statement was not required. The petitioners are Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the assessment falls well short of analyzing the potential impacts. The petition itself does not lay out specific objections, but in January the same group, plus Connecticut and Vermont, filed comments raising noise, collisions with birds and wildlife, waste from packaging and batteries, and land-use effects. The suit lands as the FAA moves toward finalizing its Part 108 beyond-visual-line-of-sight rule, with Amazon Prime Air, Wing and Zipline ramping up.

Our Take: Drone dropping in your back yard is slightly terrifying. Noise is a fair complaint. Anyone who has heard a drone hover knows the sound.

For some petitioners, privacy may be the bigger worry, and it fits a wider unease about how technology shows up in our daily lives, the same conversation happening around license plate cameras.

There is also probably a scale problem. A drone carries one package. A household that loves the Amazon order button can get four to six deliveries a day, so multiply that across a neighborhood and you get constant traffic overhead. Jessie does not think this lawsuit stops development, and in her view the environmental concerns are less extreme than the federalism fight underneath. The FAA controls the sky, and the states are using the one lever they have. Historically, the FAA tends to win these. But communities can shape what happens to them, just ask any public-use airport.

Read More: Aviation Week

The Scoop: After Florida restricted airports from using ADS-B data to bill landing fees for Part 91 aircraft at or under 12,499 pounds, Kissimmee Gateway Airport (KISM) proposed a camera-based alternative, according to Aero-News Network. The city would expand its agreement with Vector Airport Systems to add the Vantage aircraft identification system: four camera pods at $10,000 each plus a server and networking equipment, listed at $40,000 and discounted to $36,000. Under the proposal, Vector would keep 15% of the Part 91 and Part 135 landing fees it collects, plus an additional 10% of monthly collections until the equipment cost is recovered, with annual maintenance of $6,480 in years two through five. The fixed-wing landing fee would rise from $3.00 to $3.75 per 1,000 pounds of maximum landing weight, a 25% increase, with based aircraft and the first daily landing for aircraft under 5,000 pounds exempt. AVweb reported the program generated $442,238 in its first year. The contract acknowledges that some tail numbers may be unreadable. Both items were on the city commission's September 22 consent agenda, and the coverage linked here was published before that meeting.

Our Take: This is the airport saying checkmate. On the show, we guessed that a camera network would cost a fortune and take years to pay back. The reported numbers say otherwise: $36,000 in equipment plus Vector's cut, against roughly $440,000 a year in fees. For the airport, that math works.

The ADS-B argument had a clean hook, since the industry was told ADS-B was for safety. It is much harder to argue against someone photographing an airplane parked on a public ramp, and covering your tail number before you pull up to the FBO is not a plan. The more interesting angle may be NBAA's advocacy on aircraft registration privacy, which suddenly looks very relevant. The open question is whether one government entity can be blocked from data another one holds.

The counterpoint is airports genuinely need revenue, a theme from our conversations with Sky Harbour and others, and there are real tax and registration reasons ownership data is not fully hidden.

Read More: Aero-News Network

The Scoop: Global Jet Capital's sixth annual Business Jet Market Forecast, released September 14, projects $247 billion in total new and pre-owned transactions from 2026 through 2030, with dollar volume growing at an average annual rate of 4.1%, according to Private Jet Card Comparisons and AeroTime. The number of transactions is forecast to grow 2.8% a year, with 2026 transactions up 3.6% and dollar volume up 5.5%. Heavy jets are expected to grow fastest, with new and pre-owned heavy jet transaction volume rising 3.3% and 4.9% a year, respectively. GlobalAir reported that the model projects heavy jets will make up 33.6% of new deliveries by 2030, up from 30.2% over the last five years, and 4,533 new deliveries worth $130.7 billion over the period. North America is expected to remain the largest market at roughly three-quarters of transactions, with Latin America second.

Our Take: The headline is measured growth, not a moonshot. What stands out to Jessie is the steady march to heavier jets. As buyers keep climbing the ladder, do we end up with a market of light jets and heavies with very little in between? And with only so many pilots and airports, where does it end?

The units versus dollars gap tells the story. Transactions grow 2.8% a year while dollars grow 4.1%, which is what constrained capacity looks like. Right now, like-new large-cabin inventory on the secondary market is very thin. OEMs can forecast with real confidence off their backlogs, provided they can actually build the airplanes.

For lenders, the question is residual value and whether today's prices set up a steeper depreciation curve over the life of a loan. Values in late model large cabin markets have climbed over the last twelve months, and this report suggests that strength is steady rather than a bubble waiting to correct. Every make and model is its own micro market, so a GIV-SP will not depreciate like a G450 or G550. Jessie adds that bonus depreciation is now priced in. Preston's test for a healthy market is values not outstripping inflation by multiples, and nobody he talks to is banging the drum that it is overheated, barring a black swan. Fingers crossed.

Read More: Private Jet Card Comparisons

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This Is Not an Airport

Preston's pick: AOPA announced it is leaving X and will no longer monitor its account there. A popular parody account quote-posted it with a reminder that X is not an airport, so there is no need to announce your departure. The replies piled on from there. X is a place where people roast each other for fun, and some brands thrive on it, but a farewell post just opens the door. Lesson learned: leave quietly. And AOPA, if you are not using those followers, we know a podcast that would take good care of them.

Gucci Gang Goes Rotary

Jessie's pick started as a video of a helicopter falling off the side of a truck. It turned out to be a Russian influencer who painted an old helicopter in designer-style stripes and logos, mounted it on a limo, and sent it over a hill. In all our creative meetings, nobody has ever suggested strapping a helicopter to a car and driving it down the street. Jessie says the paint job is what sold it. Preston hopes it came with a brand partnership, because otherwise that is a lot of paint.

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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. Descriptions of legal proceedings, regulatory matters, accidents, and unresolved business situations reflect published reports and public records, and are not findings of fact by The VIP Seat, its hosts, or any company named. No probable cause has been determined in any accident discussed. Nothing here is legal or flight operations advice for any particular situation. Jessie Naor is the founder of the Private Aviation Safety Alliance, which is referenced in this issue. 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.