Your business aviation hot takes, served fresh.

May 5th, 2026 | Season 3 Episode 18 Companion

Good morning and welcome back to the VIP Seat. This week we are covering Spirit Airlines ceasing operations, the launch order for Piaggio's Avanti NX, GMR's $5 billion IPO filing, Avinode's response to Russia sanction allegations, and the FAA's proposed CF34 inspection AD tied to the 2024 Hop-A-Jet crash. Sit back, buckle up, and let's take off.

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The Scoop: Spirit Airlines began an orderly wind-down of its operations effective immediately on May 2, 2026, after talks on a proposed $500 million federal bailout collapsed. According to multiple outlets, a key group of creditors rejected the rescue terms, which would have given the federal government priority over Spirit's assets and a potentially controlling stake. Spirit canceled all flights, shut down customer service, and instructed customers not to go to the airport. The carrier had been the country's eighth-largest airline by seats in 2025 and held roughly a 4 percent share of the U.S. market according to aviation-data firm Cirium. Spirit said about 17,000 direct and indirect employees were affected. It is the first major U.S. airline in 25 years to go out of business for financial reasons. Spirit had filed for bankruptcy twice since 2024, and recent fuel-price pressure tied to the war in Iran reportedly accelerated the cash burn. JetBlue's $3.8 billion offer for Spirit was blocked by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2023, and a prior Frontier merger attempt also fell through.

Our Take: This one is hard to talk about without thinking about the 17,000 households who just lost their employer overnight. We try to hold two ideas at the same time. The first is that we are generally not in favor of the federal government buying/bailing out an airline. The second is that the government already intervened by blocking the JetBlue deal and souring the Frontier conversation, and Spirit was openly looking for an exit path before it ran out of runway. So we are skeptical of the bailout, and we are also skeptical of celebrating "blocked merger" headlines that closed off the more orderly path.

Read More: CNBC

The Scoop: Piaggio Aerospace announced a contract for two P.180 Avanti NX aircraft at AERO Friedrichshafen 2026, the first order for the next-generation version of the Avanti family. According to Piaggio, the aircraft will be delivered in an executive business configuration with stretcher modules to enable conversion to air ambulance operations. The customer was not identified and the contract value was not disclosed. CEO Giovanni Tomassini said the deal, signed alongside Piaggio's return to the show, reflects renewed momentum under Baykar, the Turkish defense company that took ownership of Piaggio. The Avanti NX builds on the original three-lifting-surface P.180 design, which celebrates the 40th anniversary of its first flight this year. Piaggio has said it is targeting an annual production rate of up to 30 aircraft as it scales under Baykar's backing.

Our Take: The catfish is back, and it brought medical modules. This airframe has its diehards: the pusher props, the very high cruise ceiling, the quiet cabin, the stall behavior that comes from the way the front wing pushes the nose down. None of that has changed. What has changed is the owner. Baykar is a defense and unmanned-systems company, and it is hard to look at a Hammerhead-style heritage and a CEO talking about a "comeback" and not at least wonder whether an autonomous variant is somewhere on the runway. For now, this is two airplanes for an unnamed European operator with an air-ambulance angle, which is exactly the kind of role where the Avanti's economics pencil. We will reserve judgment on the broader 30-aircraft-a-year ambition until we see deliveries. But the catfish is officially flying again, and we love to see a turboprop with this much personality back in the conversation.

Read More: AIN Online

The Scoop: Global Medical Response, the KKR-backed emergency medical services company that operates as GMR Solutions, launched its initial public offering on May 4, 2026, targeting a valuation of up to $5 billion, according to Reuters. The company is offering 31.9 million shares at $22 to $25, seeking to raise up to $797.9 million, and plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker GMRS. Funds affiliated with KKR, Ares, and HPS are expected to purchase $350 million of private placement warrants alongside the IPO. J.P. Morgan, KKR Capital Markets, and BofA Securities are among the underwriters. GMR completed a $5.4 billion refinancing in 2025, operates across roughly 1,400 U.S. counties, and reports about 5.5 million patient encounters annually. KKR purchased Air Medical from Bain Capital in 2015 for roughly $2 billion and merged it with American Medical Response in 2018, forming GMR. Per Reuters, KKR will retain majority voting power post-IPO, making GMR a "controlled company" under NYSE governance standards.

Our Take: Time to ring the M&A gong, and this one is loud. KKR has been holding GMR since 2018, and the path to liquidity is finally opening. The business has changed a bit compared to a few years ago: the Grandview fleet went, medical billing margins have started recovering, and the FEMA disaster-response work continues to add ancillary revenue. The valuation probably works if the post-IPO story is medical evacuation as a vertically integrated essential service, not an air-ambulance roll-up. Wheels Up went straight to the public markets via SPAC and is still working through that integration story. We’ll be on the lookout to see how the public markets treat a business with this much diversification as opposed to a pure play private aviation operator.

Read More: Reuters

The Scoop: Moody's Ratings upgraded Vista Global Holding Ltd., the parent of VistaJet and XO, to a B2 long-term corporate family rating from B3, and lifted its probability-of-default rating to B2-PD from B3-PD, according to Private Jet Card Comparisons. Moody's also assigned a B3 instrument rating to the $525 million backed senior unsecured notes Vista is currently marketing, with International Financing Review reporting that proceeds will be used to redeem $500 million of senior notes due in 2027. The outlook remains stable. Moody's Vice President Dirk Goedde cited "steady improvement in operating performance, supported by robust demand in the business aviation market, increasing earnings visibility from its growing Program membership base, and improving fleet utilization." Per Moody's, Program membership now accounts for roughly 60 percent of flight revenues, fleet utilization is exceeding 1,000 hours per aircraft per year, and ferry flights remain at about 30 percent. Moody's adjusted leverage stood at 5.3x at year-end 2025, which the agency described as elevated but materially improved. The agency also flagged a put option exercisable in September 2026 as a constraint on financial flexibility. Liquidity is supported by $228 million of cash and capacity under a $350 million revolving credit facility maturing in March 2028. Founder Thomas Flohr told CNBC earlier in the week that Q1 2026 was the strongest quarter for subscription additions in the company's 22-year history, and said that an IPO remains among the financial options the company is keeping open.

Our Take: The momentum has shifted. Not long ago Vista went to market for a bond, did not get all the way subscribed, and the headlines read shaky. Now we have a Moody's upgrade, the strongest subscription quarter in company history per Flohr, a fleet utilization number above 1,000 hours, and IPO rumors that have moved from speculation to "all options remain on the table" on cable news. When a bond does not subscribe at a given coupon, you raise the coupon until it clears, and that is how you set the price. An upgrade like this one cuts the other direction. Better rating, more buyers, lower cost of capital on the next issuance, and more capacity to fund things like the 18 Global 7500 to Global 8000 upgrades and the 40 Challenger 3500s on firm order.

Read More: Private Jet Card Comparisons

The Scoop: Avinode, the charter sourcing and quoting platform now part of Hearst's CAMP Systems group, responded to a Swedish television investigation that alleged its platform was being used by Russian-linked companies fly clients in spite of EU sanctions imposed after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The report, from SVT's Nyheter program, alleged that Russian brokers had opened offices in jurisdictions including Turkey, Cyprus, and the United Arab Emirates to obscure Russian connections. Avinode's published response stated, in part, that the responsibility for verifying passengers and screening against applicable sanctions lists "lies with the aircraft operator and the relevant national authorities." The company said it terminated memberships for all customers based in Russia and Belarus following the 2022 invasion, that it has a formal Know-Your-Customer process strengthened that same year, and that daily screening is overseen by a dedicated compliance team. Avinode also stated that Your Charter, an entity referenced in the SVT report, has not been a customer since April 2022. Avinode does not sell flights directly. Operators pay to list aircraft, and brokers pay to subscribe to the database.

Our Take: KYC has to live somewhere, and the operator and the regulator are the parties that actually clear a passenger and a flight. That said, "facts are important" is a strong opening line from the LinkedIn post. The question we think matters: Where exactly does the responsibility for customer KYC fall, and how much of that can a B2B sourcing platform reasonably be expected to carry on top of what the operators and authorities already do? Reasonable people can disagree on that. What is harder to disagree with is that the optics of allegedly having employees say "open an office in Cyprus".

Read More: Private Jet Card Comparisons

The Scoop: The FAA on April 30, 2026, released a notice of proposed rulemaking that would require operators to inspect General Electric CF34 engines installed on Challenger 600-series aircraft and CRJ200-family jets, according to ch-aviation. The proposal applies to an estimated 1,152 engines, including the CF34-1A, CF34-3A, CF34-3A1, CF34-3A2, and CF34-3B variants. The NPRM states that the action was prompted by a dual-engine power loss event and a subsequent manufacturer investigation that revealed corrosion in the high-pressure compressor case affecting the variable geometry system. The FAA does not name the triggering event in the NPRM, but it has been linked to the February 2024 crash of a Hop-A-Jet-operated Challenger 604 near Naples Municipal Airport. The proposed AD would require borescope inspections for corrosion, with VG system functional checks depending on results, and corrective actions could include engine retirement. Some engines would also be subject to restart tests every three months. The FAA will accept comments on the proposed AD through June 15, 2026.

Our Take: We talked about this last week with the Hop-A-Jet CEO Barry Ellis, and the borescope/corrosion conversation has been on a build. We have heard about it from Kenn Ricci, we have heard about it from AB Jets, and we have heard about it from aircraft brokers structuring pre-purchase inspections that include scopes that engine programs push back against. The AD itself is a step. What it really does is push the industry toward an open conversation about where engine borescopes belong in a maintenance program and what the tolerance levels actually are.

Read More: ch-aviation

Buying Cheap Jets is Risky Biz

Vanity Plates Are the New Ambulance

Chad Gilson posted an SUV with a "JET AVATOR" vanity plate this week and asked what the aviation attorney equivalent of an ambulance chaser is. The bit lands because we have all seen the highway billboards. We may have just found the runway version. If you are not already connected with Chad on LinkedIn, we recommend it. The comedy hit rate on LinkedIn has not been this high since well before the great AI slop wave.

The Cost-Sharing Clip That Wasn't

A short clip made the rounds this week with a broker explaining that you can split costs on a Part 135 charter as long as one person has operational control. A short PSA for principals: your social-media person probably does not have your level of subject-matter expertise, so a quick check on script accuracy goes a long way.

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Jessie’s Links:
Private Aviation Safety Alliance
FlyVizor
LinkedIn

Preston’s Links:
Prestige Aircraft Finance
Private Jet Insider (Newsletter)
LinkedIn
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FastJets