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Disclaimer:

This episode discusses publicly available information, including the NTSB final report, related docket materials, and commentary from our guest. The conversation is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to assign legal liability, determine fault, or serve as legal, technical, maintenance, or regulatory advice. The views expressed by guests are their own. Listeners and viewers should review the official NTSB report and consult qualified legal, regulatory, maintenance, or safety professionals before drawing conclusions or making operational decisions.

April 29th, 2026 | Season 3 Episode 16 Companion

The final NTSB report on the February 2024 Naples accident is out, and Barry Ellis came on the show to walk us through what his team has learned, what they want every Challenger operator to know, and where the company goes from here.

This was not a quick or an easy conversation. Hop-A-Jet is a 50-year-old South Florida operator that lost two pilots, Captain Ed Murphy and First Officer Ian Hoffman, in the dual engine failure of a Challenger 604 on approach to Naples on February 9, 2024. The NTSB final report, released last week, identifies corrosion of the variable guide vane (VG) system on both engines as the probable cause, with inadequate fault isolation guidance from the engine manufacturer cited as contributing. Barry came on to talk about the report, the missed opportunities his team believes existed long before the accident, the changes Hop-A -et is pushing for across the fleet, and what other operators should be doing right now. We covered the human side, the mechanical side, the engine program economics, and the road back for the company.

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Two pilots, a flight attendant, and a crew that did exactly what they trained for

We opened the show by honoring Captain Ed Murphy and First Officer Ian Hoffman.

Ed Murphy was a 30-year Hop-A-Jet veteran who started in line service in 1996 and worked his way into the left seat of the Challenger. Barry told us he was a Mensa member with unusually good handwriting for a pilot, which is the kind of detail you only know about a friend.

Ian Hoffman started his jet career at Hop-A-Jet in the 1980s, spent 30-plus years flying for the airlines, and came back to finish his career where it began.

Barry was clear that the flight attendant on board, a former collegiate athlete, was the right person to be in that cabin that day, and that her actions, combined with the passengers working as a team, are why three of the five occupants survived. As for the cockpit, Barry's view was that Ed and Ian did what every pilot is trained to do in an emergency: they flew the airplane. They avoided a stall-spin, found a landing spot, and put it on the ground.

What the NTSB report actually says

The NTSB's final report identifies corrosion of both engines' variable guide vane (VG) system components as the probable cause, leading to off-schedule operation and near-simultaneous sub-idle rotating compressor stalls on approach. The contributing factor cited is inadequate fault isolation guidance from the engine manufacturer, which the report says prevented identification of corrosion buildup during troubleshooting of hung start events about one month before the accident.

Barry walked us through what a VG system actually is, essentially a set of louvers in front of each compressor stage that regulate the angle and volume of air hitting the compressor blades. When they do not advance in sync, you get a compressor stall. The hardest part to wrap your head around, as we discussed on the show, is the simultaneity.

Barry told us the engines were unusually closely matched, both original to the airframe, with the same hours, cycles, and environmental exposure. According to investigators, the engines had nearly identical wear patterns. From a pure logic standpoint, if the failure mode is corrosion-driven and the inputs are identical, near-simultaneous failure is exactly what you would expect.

The missed opportunities, in Hop-A-Jet's view

This was the heart of the conversation. Barry walked us through several points where, in his view, the failure could have been caught. The 3,200-hour borescope inspection on the engines was performed by the engine manufacturer in September 2023, less than six months before the accident. Barry's position is that corrosion does not develop in six months, and that the inspection should have caught it.

About a month before the accident, the airplane experienced hung starts on both engines after a brief shutdown on a taxiway. Hop-A-Jet spent three days on the ground troubleshooting with the engine manufacturer, but Barry told us the troubleshooting tree never reached the maintenance practice (MP68) that would have pressure-tested the VG system. He also pointed to a prior issue on the larger CF-34 engine, the version on the CRJ200 commuter, where the FAA issued an emergency airworthiness directive after similar problems post-COVID. Barry's view, which he laid out plainly, is that information about the larger CF-34's emergency AD was not effectively disseminated to operators of the business jet variant of the engine, and that this was a missed opportunity.

The engine program math has changed

We spent real time on the economics, because they matter for every Challenger owner reading this. Barry told us that GE's OnPoint engine program historically covered corrosion fully on the CF-34 engines used in the 601, 604, 605, and 650 series.

According to Barry, somewhere after an offshore operator’s engine hung start episode, the OnPoint contract language changed, and corrosion coverage on new contracts is now capped at $50,000. He told us a corrosion fix on these engines runs about $1 million per engine, often involving compressor case replacement.

He gave us a real example: Hop-A-Jet had a Challenger 605 where both engines were taken under the older OnPoint contract and the costs were covered. They also had a Challenger 650, only a few months in service with the company but on a post-2021 OnPoint contract, where the owner paid roughly $2 million out of pocket.

The conundrum Barry laid out is that if you are buying a Challenger and about to sign a new OnPoint contract, you almost have to insist on a complete and thorough corrosion-focused borescope at pre-buy, because the financial exposure in the contract has shifted onto the buyer in a way it did not used to. Operators, brokers, and pre-buy techs should all be reading this carefully.

Compressor washes, corrosion, and the calendar problem

Barry made a point that we think every Challenger operator should sit with. Corrosion accumulates on a calendar, not on a flight hour schedule. He told us this airframe was on an 800-hour compressor wash interval set when the airplane was new, and that schedule was kept across nearly two decades. But Bombardier's Chapter 5, the FAA-mandated maintenance program for the airframe, does not require compressor washes on the CF-34 at all. The compressor wash recommendation lives in the engine manufacturer's procedures, not in the regulatory document operators are required to maintain to.

Barry also said that, in his view, compressor washes without lubricating the VG system bore holes after the wash may not help and could potentially trap moisture. He noted GE has since added a lubrication step post-wash via service bulletin, which Hop-A-Jet sees as an acknowledgment that the prior procedure was incomplete.

The road back for a 50-year-old operator

Barry was honest about the business impact. After the accident, Hop-A-Jet lost access to roughly a third of the charter market, the part that flows through the largest brokers, programs, and approved-vendor lists, until the final report was published.

Argus and Wyvern, who audit Hop-A-Jet on a quarterly basis, did not pull their ratings, which Barry credited to their direct knowledge of the operation. Other approvals were paused per company policy until the report came out.

Barry's hope, now that the report is public and the cause has been attributed to corrosion in the VG system rather than to a systemic safety failure at Hop-A-Jet, is that the rest of those doors reopen. The company just celebrated its 50th anniversary. As Barry put it on the show, today is the first day of the rest of the company's life.

NTSB Accident Information and Documents: https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket?ProjectID=193769

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