Your business aviation hot takes, served fresh.

September 9th, 2026 | Season 3 Episode 36 Companion

Good morning and welcome back to the VIP Seat. This week the President calls for a ban on Bombardier sales in the United States, Honda takes a minority stake in Thrive Aviation to launch a HondaJet and Challenger 3500 fractional program, Bernie Ecclestone is reportedly detained in Portugal over a shotgun found on his Falcon, Treasury tells Senate Democrats it will not close the SIFL valuation rule, and LA County's jet tax bills land on Jeff Bezos, Rihanna, and Stan Kroenke. Sit back, buckle up, and let's take off.

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The Scoop: President Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday that Bombardier should no longer be allowed to sell its planes in the United States, writing that the company's products are not good enough and that it depends on American buyers, companies, airports and service while Canada blocks American banks and companies, according to NBC News. He added that if Bombardier wants the US market, it must build here. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), whose state hosts Bombardier's US headquarters, objected within hours, saying in a post on X that he had contacted the administration to make sure the President was aware of the company's contributions to Kansas and the importance of its Wichita presence to Kansas workers and the local supply chain. Bombardier said in a statement that it is a strong contributor to American aerospace responsible for creating tens of thousands of US jobs, with sites in Kansas, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Connecticut, Illinois, Delaware, California, Washington D.C. and New Jersey, and direct employment across more than 20 states. NBC described the post as the latest instance of Republican senators pushing back on the administration's Canada trade policy, with Canadian retaliatory tariffs expected to take effect Tuesday.

Our Take: Here we go again!

Let’s start with the premise, because the premise is doing a lot of work. "Canadian airplane" is not a clean description of a Global or a Challenger. Bombardier's own statement lists direct employment in more than 20 states, and the engines on these airframes are not Canadian either. Business jets are assembled from a supply chain that crosses several borders. A ban framed as protecting American manufacturing would land squarely on a lot of American workers, which is more or less what Senator Moran laid out.

Our read is that this looks less like aviation policy and more like leverage in a broader trade fight, and the industry has seen a version of this movie before. That does not make it free. The people we will be watching are the ones with delivery positions: the large fractional and charter operators carrying multi-year Challenger and Global order books. If you run FP&A at one of those shops, you spent Labor Day doing scenario math on a Truth Social post, and our hats are off to you.

The practical consequence for buyers is uncertainty, not price, at least not yet. Uncertainty is its own tax. What we’re watching: whether this resolves as quickly as the last threat did, and whether any OEM order book actually moves before it does.

Also, whoever at Gulfstream has Trump’s ear should get a raise.

Read More: NBC News

The Scoop: Thrive Aviation announced on September 2 a strategic partnership with, and minority investment from, Arulean Air, a subsidiary of Honda Aircraft Company. The program will initially operate the HondaJet HA-420 in the light jet category and the Bombardier Challenger 3500 in the super-midsize category. Thrive will operate and manage the program, including client relationships and flight operations, while Arulean Air acquires the aircraft. The first two aircraft have been delivered, including a Challenger 3500, and the company expects to add roughly four to six HA-420s and two to four Challenger 3500s annually as the owner base grows. The program draws on Thrive's existing platform and fleet of more than 30 aircraft. Forbes reported that Arulean Air was registered in Delaware in March 2026 and formed specifically to build and launch the program with Thrive. Thrive has separately signed a letter of intent for the HondaJet Echelon, which is still in development and not part of the launch fleet. Pricing, share sizes and service areas have not been publicly detailed. Thrive plans to formally introduce the program at NBAA-BACE, October 20 to 22 in Las Vegas.

Our Take: The structure is the story here, more than the airplanes.

Manufacturers owning fractional programs is old news. Bombardier owned Flexjet. Cessna had CitationAir. What we have not seen before is an OEM taking a minority position in an independent operator and letting that operator run the program. Thrive appears to have pushed part of the capital stack onto fractional owners in the normal way, and then found an OEM willing to underwrite a meaningful chunk of the rest. That seems like a genuinely good outcome for an operator.

Now the harder question, which is whether anyone makes money in fractional VLJs. Jet It, Volato and Jet.AI (JetToken?) all built around the HondaJet, and none of them are running that model today. Our theory on why: those programs also chased wholesale charter, which caused tension in the model. Thrive is starting from a different place, with 30-plus aircraft already producing charter revenue, so it does not need the HondaJets to carry a wholesale distribution business at the same time. If the program is underwritten on fractional flying alone and stays disciplined about it, the math looks different than it did for the last three attempts. That is our read, at least.

Geography matters too. Starting in the Western US out of Las Vegas is the VLJ version of the helicopter lesson: the economics work in specific markets rather than everywhere. And at four to six HA-420s a year, Thrive would be among the largest HondaJet operators in the country inside two years, which is exactly the kind of scale that fixes the parts and support complaints that have dogged the type. That may be the real point of the investment from Honda's side.

Also worth noting on a tariff week: they got a Challenger 3500 order in. What to watch: pricing and share sizes at NBAA-BACE in October. And Curtis, if there is a pixelated mini version of the Thrive livery coming, we want the mock-up.

Read More: Private Jet Card Comparisons

The Scoop: Former Formula 1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, 95, was reportedly detained at Tires Aerodrome in Cascais, near Lisbon, on Monday morning after a shotgun was allegedly found aboard his private jet, according to GPblog citing Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã. The weapon was said to have been discovered during a routine operation involving the airport division of Portugal's Public Security Police. Ecclestone said afterward that the shotgun was on the aircraft because he had planned to go clay-pigeon shooting, and described the episode as aggravation, according to the Daily Mail. He owns a Dassault Falcon 7X, and said his wife was in Lisbon working to resolve the matter. GPblog notes he was arrested and bailed over a similar matter in Brazil in 2022, where he acknowledged owning the gun but said he had not known it was in his luggage. The matter has not been adjudicated.

Our Take: Firearms rules vary by country, and inside the United States they vary by state. A shotgun for a clay shoot is not a controversial object anywhere. The paperwork around moving one across a border is a different question entirely, and it does not travel with you because the airplane is yours. A hunting and shooting itinerary is one of the most reliable ways for an otherwise routine international leg to become a problem on arrival.

Read More: GPblog

The Scoop: A Treasury Department official denied a request from Senate Democrats to close a tax provision used by private jet owners, arguing that changing it would be administratively burdensome for both taxpayers and the IRS, according to Bloomberg Government. The request came in a July letter from Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano, asking them to revisit the Standard Industry Fare Level method, or SIFL, which is used to value the personal use of a company aircraft for income inclusion purposes. The senators have argued the method allows the personal cost of such travel to be substantially undervalued. Alongside the July letter, Whitehouse's office released Joint Committee on Taxation analyses, one of which found that an executive would pay roughly $1,577 to $1,804 less in tax on a flight from JFK to DCA under the SIFL method. Whitehouse criticized Treasury's August response in a statement, saying the administration was using the powers of government to benefit the ultra-wealthy.

Our Take: SIFL is not a single number applied to a trip. The imputed income calculation runs per passenger, per leg, with separate treatment for control employees, a set of exceptions, and a fact pattern for every mixed business and personal itinerary. Every company with an airplane would be repricing every leg against a market rate that itself has to be sourced and defended, and likely an entire advisory cottage industry would spring up to track flights and produce those numbers. That is a lot of compliance cost spread across a lot of companies.

The part worth being clear-eyed about is that private jets are the easiest political football in Washington, and both parties pick it up. The Bombardier story at the top of this issue is the same instinct from the other direction. The rule also applies to anyone whose travel gets imputed, which is a broader group than the caricature suggests.

Our view is that the durable answer is not winning a news cycle. It is making the boring case, over and over, that for most of the companies using them, these airplanes are a tool that produces measurable business output. What to watch: whether SIFL shows up as a revenue raiser in the next tax package rather than as a rulemaking ask.

Read More: Bloomberg Government

The Scoop: The Los Angeles County Assessor has sent roughly $38 million in bills to private aircraft owners under California's annual 1 percent property tax on aircraft that are habitually situated in the state, according to the Los Angeles Times as reported by Inc. and Forbes. Reported amounts include about $244,000 tied to Jeff Bezos, about $290,000 to Rams owner Stan Kroenke for two aircraft, about $104,000 to Rihanna, about $89,000 to Phil Knight, and about $95,000 to "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, per a list obtained by the Times and verified with JetSpy. A source familiar with the situation told Inc. that Bezos received a notice in 2026 for the 2022 year but never a formal bill from the Assessor's office because of a missed deadline. Most representatives for the owners told the Times their clients had not known the county tax applied and paid promptly once they learned; the Times reported that Bezos and Knight had not paid by the June 30 deadline. Judy Sheindlin told the Times she begrudgingly paid the two bills she received, for 2022 and 2025, because she thought fighting them would cost more in legal fees. Owners who believe they were wrongly billed can appeal and seek a reduction based on time the aircraft spent out of state. The Assessor's office this year deployed aircraft discovery software that analyzes multiple data sources to identify aircraft activity at local airports; since January it has identified nearly 1,000 previously unassessed aircraft, projected to generate nearly $2.5 billion in assessed value from prior-year escaped assessments and more than $1 billion in new assessments for the 2026 tax year. Assessor Jeff Prang said his responsibility is to make sure every piece of taxable property is assessed accurately. Roughly 20 states impose personal property taxes on aircraft, with rules, rates and exemptions varying widely.

Our Take: We flagged the ADS-B tax net a few weeks back. This is what it looks like when it closes.

Nothing about the law changed. What changed is detection. Aircraft used to sit in hangars where nobody could see them, and situs was hard to prove. Now it is a software problem, and the software appears to have paid for itself several times over in nine months.

That is the part with some legs. Once one large county demonstrates the return, the rest of California follows, and then every other state with an aircraft personal property tax on the books and no enforcement budget starts asking their vendors for a demo.

One more thought on the media side, offered as a general point rather than a shot at anyone. When you are an industry voice quoted in a mainstream outlet, the sentence that survives the edit is almost never the one you would have picked. We have both sat through hour-long interviews that came back as a single line we would have phrased differently. Ours is a small industry with a persistent public image problem, so it is worth thinking about which of your sentences is the quotable one before you say it.

Read More: Inc.

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Relatable, But Only Above FL410

A reel made the rounds this week from one of the accounts doing rich-guy satire properly, where the bit is that the cabin Wi-Fi is slow enough that you have to watch a DVD like a regular person. We are on record as being tired of the earnest version of this genre. The self-aware version is a public service. Until Starlink is standard equipment, relatability is only one dropped connection away.

A Cessna 172 Walks Into a Rankings Video

Somebody put out a best-and-worst private planes ranking that placed a Cessna 172 on the same list as a TBM and a PC-12. Those are not competitors. They are not even the same conversation. Although the lineup did accidentally sketch a pretty accurate map of the owner-flown progression: 172, then a Bonanza, then a TBM, then a PC-12. We may have to make our own list and find out how far apart our two rankings actually are.

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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. Nothing here is tax or legal advice for any particular ownership structure or itinerary. 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.