Latest / VREF | The Truth About the Aviation Market / The $500k Loan Disguised as a Deposit | EP 58
Transcript
- Addison: Last episode, I spent 40 minutes telling you that nobody in this business wires eight figures for an airplane without a neutral third party holding the money. That's called escrow. The whole used aircraft market runs on it. You'd never send the money straight to the seller because the seller might not deliver. And once your wire lands in his account, it's his. Every person listening to that episode nodded along. A meaningful number of them have also wired $250,000 and or $500 or a million dollars to a jet card company as a prepaid deposit that went straight into the company's operating account for payroll, for fuel, for rent, because it's their money the moment it landed in their account. Because there is no escrow, there is no third party, there's no signature required to spend it. And there's no regulator watching. No financial statements to read because the company is private. And a contract written entirely by the company holding the money that governs when and how they're allowed to give it back. Nobody nodded at that one, huh? Because nobody thought about it. That's today. This is the anti-escrow episode. Welcome to the truth about the market. I'm Jason Zilberbrand. If you're new here, this is what I do. I'm president of VRF. We're the independent valuation firm for aviation. I'm not a broker. I'm not a dealer and I'm not a lender. When a bank needs to know what an airplane is worth before it lends against it, when an insurance company needs a number after a loss, and when a court needs one in a divorce or a bankruptcy, and when a buyer needs one before he wires, that's us. Every model flying. Pistons to Gulf Streams, updated continuously, and behind the numbers a team of accredited appraisers who sign their names to them and I'm one of them. I've spent my career putting numbers on airplanes and on the deals that move them. I've watched a lot of those deals from the inside. This show exists because most of what gets said about this market is said by someone who's selling you something. And I am not. VREF doesn't sell you airplanes. We're not a broker charter. We don't sell jet cards. And we don't take referral fees from anybody who does. Nobody pays for a mention here. So when I tell you something, the only thing riding on it is whether it's true. And today's topic is check cards, where the money actually goes when you buy one. This episode is not about NetJets and not about the one or two other providers whose balance sheets you can actually read about. NetJets shows up early because they invented the product. And what they did with it this summer tells you everything about everyone else. The episode is about everybody else. That's most of the market. And it's where almost all of the money is. So, as I say, bring a pencil. There's a red flag list and a checklist near the end, and I'm gonna close by telling you what I would do instead. So, let me strip the marketing off and describe the product as a financial instrument because that's what it is. You give a company money in advance. 50,000 to a million bucks usually. And in exchange, they promise to fly you at a fixed hourly rate on a fixed category of aircraft with some hours notice subject to a whole list of terms. Your money, it sits with them. As you fly, they draw it down. Here's what that is. It's a loan, guys. You have lent a private company a large sum of money, interest free, unsecured for a period of months or in some cases years, in exchange for a promise of future services. Company is the borrower. You are the lender. And the loan agreement, the card terms. And it was written by the borrower. Say that back to yourself because the industry has spent 25 years making sure you don't think of it that way. The word deposit does a lot of work. A deposit at a bank is yours. You know why? Because it's insured, it's segregated, and more importantly, it's regulated. A jet card deposit is an advance payment to a private company governed by By whatever that company's contract says and whatever it finances allows. Now, where did all this come from? Because almost nobody selling jet cards knows about it. In 2001, a guy named Kenny Dictor convinced Richard Santulli, the man who invented fractional ownership, to let him sell access to the NetJet's fleet in 25 hour pieces. Fractional was a sixteenth share of an airplane, which equated to 50 hours a year. And a multi-year commitment. Ditcher's pitch was, Well, there's a whole market of people who will fly 25 hours and won't sign for a five-year deal. Sell them the hours, not the airplane. That company was Marquee Jet. NetJets owned the airplanes, employed the pilots, held the certificates. Marquee sold the card. It worked so well that NetJets bought the company in 2010, and by the time that they retired the marquee name in 2021, Card flyers were something like 20% in NetJet's flight hours. Here's the part to notice. Marquee Jet was simply a reseller. From day one, the jet card business was built on selling blocks of time on somebody else's airplane. Marquee just happened to be reselling the best run fleet in the world, with the best capitalized owner behind it, and a contract that put NetJets on the hook to actually fly you. The rest of the industry learned the first half of the lesson and skipped the second. What they always took away was you don't need airplanes to sell jet cards. You just need a website and you just need an address to wire the money to. Now watch what NetJets does with the product it invented. In August of 21, they stopped selling cards completely. Demand was outrunning the fleet. Then they came back late 2022 with peak day restrictions. They caught citation XLS cards in November of 2025. And this summer, they stopped again, both card tiers and the 25-hour lease at record demand, while taking delivery of 80 new airplanes this year. Their own words, it was to focus on our core business of shared ownership and ensure that we do not compromise service delivery to existing owners. We continue to take a disciplined approach to our sales. End quote. Read that as a financial statement because it is one. The company with the most airplanes, the most pilots, the deepest pockets in the business said we cannot honor more promises than we have airplanes, so we're going to stop selling the promises. That is what it looks like when the promise is real. The fleet is the limit, and the seller hit it. Now go find the company that has never once stopped selling, that has no fleet to run out of, whose only limit is the number of people willing to wire them money. Every customer that NetJets turned away this summer walk down the street to one of those guys. That's the market this episode is about. So, is a jet card a bad product? No, and I want to be careful here because the easy version of this episode is jet cards are a scam. But that's super lazy, guys, and it's absolutely wrong. Jet cards solve a real problem. If you fly a hundred hours a year, ownership doesn't make sense, and ad hoc charter is an absolute headache. For the right flyer, a card is the right answer, and the top providers honor every hour of it. The product isn't the problem, but the structure is. See, let's put real airplanes and real money on the table. Because somewhere between $50,000 and a million dollars is too soft to be useful. So let's start at the top, because the top publishes numbers. The NetJet's entry card as reintroduced in January of 25. Well, it was 25 hours on an Umbrayer Phenom 300, 220. fifteen thousand dollars, eight thousand six hundred an hour with federal excise tax all in, ninety blackout dates, forty eight hour call outs, and then twenty four hour month terms. The step up tier on the same airplane with forty five peak days instead of ninety blackout dates with eleven thousand two hundred an hour, that's the reference price for a light jet from the company that owns the light jet. $11,200 two hundred an hour. Now the market. Doug Golan's quarterly survey, second quarter of twenty twenty six across more than eighty providers. Average jet card rate, all cabins eleven thousand three hundred an hour. Light jets, Phenom three hundreds, CJ threes, fours, about eighty four hundred an hour. Midsize aircraft like XLS and Hawker eight hundreds and Lear sixties, about ninety five hundred an hour. Super midsize Like the Challenger 300s or your longitude or your Praters, 12 and a half. Large cabins like your Challenger 650 or a G450, a little over 15,000. And then your ultra long range, like your G650 or Global 7500, is about 19,000 an hour. Those are the sticker prices. The terms are moving to. Average peak days, 45 a year, roughly double 2019. Average daily minimum. An hour and a half. So a 45 minute hop bills at 93 minutes. Average call out 66 hours, not 48, nearly triple pre-pandemic. And rates sit at about 28% above the end of 2019. So here's the setup. Take a broker with no airplanes selling a light jet card at the industry average, 8,400 an hour, 25 hours. $210,000 wired up front. When you call, the broker goes into the charter market and buys a Phenom 300 from a Part 135 operator. Round numbers, flagged in the notes. Call it $6,000 an hour on a normal day. The spread is $2,400 an hour on a slow Tuesday in February. Guys, that's a really good business. Now, let's move to Christmas week or the Super Bowl. Or even worse, spring breakout in the Northeast. Spot charter on a light jet doesn't cost $6,000 an hour that week. It costs $9,000, $10,000, whatever the last airplane in the country's going for. The broker sold you guaranteed availability at $8,400 an hour. They're buying it at $10 and selling at $84,000, losing $1,600 an hour on every peak day flight. So how do they cover it? And with what? Well, that's where the operating account comes in, which is the next customer's deposit. That's the whole business, guys. That's it. Card broker sells a fixed price on a floating commodity with no inventory and finances the difference with customer money on the way up. That float grows and everybody looks brilliant on the way down. The float is the first thing that goes and it isn't theirs. Now multiply a hundred cardholders at $210,000. That's $20 million of other people's money in a company you cannot see inside of. Guys, that's not a jet company. That's a small bank with no charter, no capital requirement, no examiner, and one product. So where does the money actually sit? Well, there are three answers, and the difference between them is absolutely everything. The first answer is a true escrow account. Your money goes to a bank in an account that requires your signature, or a defined event, like a completed flight, and that's when the funds can move. The company can't touch it unilaterally. It is rare, it usually costs extra, and where it is offered, it's offered on request. If you didn't ask, you don't have it. The second is a segregated account. Your money is held separately from operating funds, but the company can move it without your signature. That is not escrow. That's an honor system with a separate account number. And it's worth exactly as much as the honor of the people running the company. The third is the operating account. Your money goes into it. It's the same account the company pays its pilots from. It's the working capital the day it arrives. When the company needs money, and every private aviation company needs a lot of it, your deposit is cash. Guys, most of the market is the third one. Some of it is the second. Almost none of it is the first. Now, here's the part that should really bother you. No one requires any of this to be otherwise. The flight is regulated, of course. The airplane is operated under Part 135, if it's absolutely legal, and the pilots are certificated. The maintenance is inspected. The FAA's all over it. But the money sits outside of all that. See, the Department of Transportation regulates charter brokers under Part 295. And I read the consumer protection section, so you don't have to. And guess what? It requires the broker to disclose who the carrier is, what the broker's role is, what the fees are. In what insurance applies. And it requires prompt refunds if a flight can't be performed. That's it. There's nothing about deposits. There's nothing about escrow. There's nothing about solvency. There's nothing about capital. There's nothing about audits. A refund obligation with no requirement that the company be able to pay it. Right? The flight's regulated. Guys, the money is far from it. Okay, quick pause. I'd like to ask you to follow the show and Please like this episode. If you have a chance, we would love for you to subscribe and leave us a rating. No jet card company, no broker, no membership program paid for a second of this episode. All the other shows you listen to, guess who's paying for it? And that's the only reason the back half of this can exist. So the algorithm, as you guys know, is my marketing department and you are the algorithm. I'm asking you for 10 seconds. Please like, subscribe, leave me your review now. And I'm gonna get back to this. Okay, so everything in this segment comes from published reporting and the public record, and I want that on the record. So in April of 2020, Jet Suite, a real operator with a real fleet, and a name people in this business knew, filed for Chapter 11 and grounded its aircraft. According to the reporting at the time, roughly a thousand jet card members had deposits with the company. And the estimate of what was at stake was around fifty million dollars. When the fleet stopped flying, the company reportedly had less than a million dollars cash, fifty million in customer deposits, and under a million bucks in the bank. The deposits weren't sitting anywhere, they'd been spent because they were in operating accounts, and operating accounts get operated. Now, Jet Suite had reasons. The pandemic shut down private aviation almost overnight, and plenty of good companies got hurt. I'm not here to tell you they were villains. I'm here to tell you that it absolutely didn't matter whether a company loses your money through fraud or through misfortune, the company has gone the same way. And the customers who lost it did the careful thing. They wired to a known operator with airplanes and a track record. The name was fine at the time, but the structure was the problem and nobody knew. And that's the lesson. It's the same one from the escrow episode. Go back and listen to it. Trust the structure, not the name. If that can happen at a recognized brand with a fleet, it can happen anywhere the structure is the same. And the structure is the same almost everywhere, guys. And here's the thing, and I'd have you sit with it. Jet Suite is the case anyone can name because it was big enough to make the news. When a three-person broker with 15 cardholders shuts its doors, guess what, guys? Nobody writes anything about that. There's no press release. When we have no media anymore in our industry, so nobody's going to report it. And there's no bankruptcy filing worth reporting because the money's simply gone. The people who lost it are so embarrassed that they quietly disappear and the industry moves on. You'll never read about those, not because they don't happen, because they're too small to count and nobody cares. So is there anywhere you can find out which providers protect your money and which downside? Well, there is. There's exactly one place, and I want to be fair about it because credit is due where credit is due. Private jet card comparisons, Doug Golensite is a consumer subscription. It's about five hundred bucks a year. They track over a thousand jet card and fractional companies. It's the only independent source in the business. It's where the rate survey came from. It's the outlet that reported the jet suite numbers. In twenty twenty three they published a list of the providers that offer an escrow option. Nineteen. Out of more than 500 programs that were tracked at the time. And even those 19, in their words, offer it on request. It's not a matter of course. 19. And they track it in their comparison spreadsheet. Actually, it's in column BC and a hidden column B D. Read that back. The single most important fact about a Jet Card, whether the company can spend your money the day it arrives is tracked. In the entire industry in one subscription spreadsheet, and it's in a hidden column that most buyers have never ever opened. Now, look, that is absolutely not a criticism of Doug, because he built the spreadsheet. He built the only instrument there is, and he chose the right business model, in my opinion. Subscribers pay him, providers don't, so he has no reason to shade anybody. It's an indictment of everyone else. If the only deposit protection disclosure in a multi billion dollar business lives in a hidden column, then the regulator failed, in my opinion. The trade associations failed, and the buyers didn't look. There's no rating, there's no grade, there's no one whose job it is to say it out loud. This provider holds your money in escrow, and this one holds it in a checking account. Which is the segue and it's a natural one. Everything in this episode is about the difference between a number that means something. And a number that merely appeared. That's the business I'm in. A VREF online membership gives you current values, historical trends, operating costs, and fleet data on virtually everything flying with a methodology that I'll explain to you. Cause I'm a human being who'll answer the phone and I'll talk to you about it. And when the money is real, when you're buying, selling, financing, litigating, get an accredited appraisal from someone whose number survives a courtroom. Go to VREF.com. VREF it. Know where your name number came from, guys. Okay. So here's who this episode is actually about. A very large share of companies selling jet cards own no aircraft. None. They're Part 295 aircraft charter brokers, running the business I described earlier. You deposit your money to them, it's working capital today. Some of them are excellent at this and have been doing it for 20 years. Some of them are two people on a website, and from the outside you can't tell which is which. That's not an accident. Go look at the websites, guys. I've spent an unreasonable amount of time on them for this episode, and they are built to be indistinguishable from operators and from each other. They use the same photography, the light jet at a golden hour, the family on the air stairs, same vocabulary, guaranteed availability, all inclusive, no blackout dates. Right above the peak day calendar. Same as low as price, which is the best category on an off peak day before the minimums. Same our fleet page. It's a company that owns no aircraft, but it has a page called Our Fleet, and there's photos of Those planes belong to Part one hundred thirty five operators the broker buys lift from. And it's this month until the pricing changes, and then they buy it next month from somebody else. Our quote unquote Is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Same safety badges, Argus Platinum, Wyvern Wingman, IS This, real audits, rigorous ones of the operator, the company that holds the actual certificate, company that actually employs the pilots, the one that actually maintains those airplanes, the broker displaying them is displaying somebody else's report card. It's not theirs, and nothing on the page tells you that. Now here's what the rule actually says because there is a rule, part two ninety-five, section two ninety-five.23. A broker solicitation materials must clearly state that the air charter broker is an air charter broker and that it's not a direct air carrier. Clearly, it must state those things. And section 295.50 prohibits misrepresentations that may introduce members of the public to reasonably believe that the air charter broker. Is actually a direct air carrier. So if you go back to the homepage, to their fleet page, to the photos of those aircraft, to their safety badges and our pilot quotes, somewhere, I promise you, if you keep scrolling in the footer and the gray and the eight-point type, this company is a air charter broker and not a direct air carrier, you'll find it. Technically, it'll be present. I'll let you decide whether a footer is obvious and transparent. Everything on the page above it was designed to produce the impression the footer disclaims. And then there's what isn't on the page at all, where your deposit sits. It's not there. I've never seen a broker's homepage say your deposit is held in escrow at blank, blank, blank, because they're not going to name a bank, because there aren't any financial statements. You'll not gonna know how long they've been in business. You're not gonna know who actually operates your flight. Not there, not until you're signing the contract. Which is legal, by the way, because section two ninety-five dot twenty-four only requires it before the contract, which means the single most important fact about the airplane you're getting on is the last thing you learn. You don't know if it had accident history. You don't know anything about it. You don't know if it was imported from a country that's on its sanctions list. You don't know if it was removed from engine programs. You don't know if it was flipped twenty-five times in the last year. See, when forty companies look identical. It's because the product is a commodity and the real differences are in exactly the things the page leaves out. No, one rung further down because there's a layer beneath the card brokers and it's growing faster than any of them. And this one I can't stand. It's the empty leg business, the deadhead resellers. When an operator flies you from Teterborough to Palm Beach, the airplane has to come home. That return is called a deadhead. It's an empty leg. And the operator would rather sell it for something than fly it for nothing. And it's real. Any good broker will find you one if the timing lines up, and I mean any broker. What's new is the companies whose entire business is reselling that with their apps and their memberships and their fly private for the price of first class garblygook. Up to 70% off garbly gook annual fees for access to a list. Flight credits you buy in advance to spend on empty legs when they appear. Some are, in every respect, that matters a jack card with worse terms. Money up front, promised later, dressed up as a deal. They're all over Twitter feeds. You'll find them all over Instagram. Forewarned is forearmed. Stay away. Understand what you're buying. A deadhead exists because somebody else paid for the outbound. You are the passenger of the last resort. If the paying customer moves his return by a day, your flight doesn't move, it disappears. You didn't charter an airplane. You bought a maybe, and the company that sold you the maybe doesn't own the airplane, doesn't control the airplane, doesn't control the schedule, and is mostly showing you the same feed of empty legs every other broker in the country sees because it comes from the same two or three booking platforms. Doug Golan Site asked the question straight in 2024. Are empty legs a bait and switch? And the most honest answer came from the founder of one of those platforms that supplies the listings. Empty legs, he said, are the most searched term in the business, and they work mainly as a marketing hook. Operators hold the same reporter, the flights rarely sell in volume. They're lead generation, guys. The list is the product. You are the product. So membership fee or prepaid credits for access to empty legs is the lay is the card structure with the guarantee removed. And the contract for cards and empty legs alike. Remember who wrote it? Peak days, surcharges, daily minimums, cancellation windows, measured in days, taxi time billed as flight time, and an expiration date on the money, after which your unused deposit is theirs. It's all in the forty pages, and every term in their moves value from you to them. Okay, this is where you need the pencil. This is the part I want you to write down. Red flags first. Any one of these isn't proof of anything. Three of them together, and you should keep your wire in your pocket. The first one is, I think, pretty obvious. The as low as rate is below the industry average for the category. A light jet card materially under eighty four hundred an hour from a company with no airplanes is a fixed price below with the lift costs on a bad day. Ask who's funding the difference. Number two, no blackout dates in the headline. The company that owns the most airplanes in the world has 90 on its entry card. A company that owns none has zero. Either the promise isn't real or the fine print takes it back. Guys, read the fine print. Three. And quote our fleet, unquote page from a company whose footer says it's a broker. Stay away from Four. They won't tell you which operators fly for them until you're at a contract. Do you really want to fly an aircraft that's been damaged? Legally, it's a choice, guys. Alright. Five. The answer. Where does my deposit sit? That question is a big one. You should like underline it twice. It's really a big paragraph instead of a word if you think about it. Number six, a discount for a larger deposit. Think about what that tells you about how badly they need the cash today. Why would they discount it if there's such a huge demand? Seven, the company on the contract isn't the company on the website. Different LLCs, different states. It's not always sinister, but you're lending to the entity on the contract, not the logo guys, read everything. Here's number eight, pressure. Does the rate expire Friday? A founding member tier, anybody hurrying you toward a wire is telling you something about their cash position. They need your money. Number nine, the empty leg version of all the above, a membership fee or prepaid credits for access to flights the company doesn't control. Major league red flag. Now the due diligence. What I'd actually do in order before a dollar moves. None of it takes more than an afternoon. First, the entity. Secretary of State's websites. Whatever state the contract entity is formed in, you should run it for free, the formation date, the status, and whether it's the same entity as the one on the website. Then a simple UCC search on that entity. Because if a lender has a blanket lien on all the assets, the account your deposit lands in is already somebody else's collateral, and you're standing behind a secured creditor now. Good luck getting your money back. Second, let's talk about the operator. You need to ask in writing. For the names, the FAA license and certi certification numbers, the Part 135 cert. You need to ask about all of it because they're the ones who are flying you. You need to check those certificates against the FAA's operator database because it's public and you can do that. Then check those operators directly with Argus or check them with Wyvern, not the badge on the broker's page. Guys, people use badges all the time. Do you know how many people out there claim they're an ASA appraiser and are not one? Don't be fooled by the badge on the website. If a broker won't name operators before they they contract with you, you've learned what you need to. That's a red flag. Walk. Okay. Third, let's talk about the money. You need to ask for a letter from the bank confirming an escrow or segregated account for the customer deposits, and then what's required to move funds out of it. Not the broker's letter. The bank's. A real escrow arrangement produces that letter in a day. If the answer is we don't do that, well, now you know you're making an unsecured loan and you can size it accordingly. Red flag, you betcha. Fourth, this is a good one, the courts and the people. Run the entity and the principals through PACER. Run them through the federal court system. It's a few bucks. Unpaid operators are the first symptom. They stop flying. You before the company stops answering the phone and search the principals, not the company. The company is two years old. The principals, I promise you, have come from somewhere else. They've been in this business. They could have been in it for 20 years. What happened to their last company? Do you know? Did you ask? Fifth, the size. If you still want the card, the smallest block they sell with the shortest term. You know what you can do? And this is a really good trick. Pay by credit card if they'll take it. But I'm telling you right now most won't. And the ones that do are going to charge you a fee. But that fee is insurance. It's the cheapest deposit insurance you'll ever buy because a card gives you chargeback rights. A wire never will. Demand that they take the credit card. Don't you dare wire them any money. Six, the five questions in writing before you wire. Or use your credit card. Where does my deposit sit? And will you confirm the bank in writing? Do you own the aircraft or broker them? Who will operate my flights? And who's going to do it now? Not at the contract. And if you go out of business, what happens to my balance? I want the mechanism. I don't want your promise. And show me what those peak days are. Show me what those surcharges are when it's April and you want to get to the masters. Show me what the minimums are and the expiration on one page. Every one of those has a boring answer at a good provider. And the good providers, plenty of brokers included. We'll answer before you finish asking the questions. And you know what? The ones who brush you off or bristle just told you where your money sits. And it gets worse. Not because the people get worse, because the arithmetic does. Demand is at a record right now. Flight activity is running a third above twenty nineteen. The company at the top just closed its doors to new customer cards for the second time in five years, and everyone turned away is now shopping down the ladder. Meanwhile The lift is finite. Airplanes are late from the factories, pilots are scarce and expensive, so when the wholesale price of an hour, the price the broker pays, is going up and getting more volatile at exactly the moment before brokers are selling more fixed price promises to more people. You can already see it in the survey. Peak days doubled since twenty nineteen, callouts nearly tripled. That's brokers quietly taking back the guarantee one term at a time because they can't afford the guarantee they sold. When terms can't stretch any further. The next step is the float. Cover this week's peak day losses with next week's deposits. That works until the deposits slow down or they stop. A soft quarter recession, a bad headline, and then it doesn't all at once, the way Jet Suite didn't. And every time the top of the market closes the tap, a new LLC opens a website because the barrier to entry is a domain name and a bank account. Part 295 doesn't require capital. The more the good operators ration their lift, the more of the market is served by people who don't have any. So here's what I would do, and it's really not complicated. You just go direct to the operator. You skip the broker because they're buying from the operator. The operator, the guy that owns the part 135 certificate. And there's almost certainly one at your home airport or the one next to you. They have a hangar you can walk into, a director of operations. I bet you there's a chief pilot and you can shake his hand, and I guarantee you there's a director of maintenance. Airplanes with tail numbers you can look up. A certificate you can look up. With an Argus or Wyvern audit that's actually there is that they will provide you. And you can ask what they'll do for you. A lot of them will sell you a block of hours directly. Trust me, I know I've done it. Same unsecured loan problem though, but you're lending to the company that owns the asset employs the crew, and you can see whether the hangar is full. Better yet, ask whether you can just charter for a trip by trip at a preferred rate for a regular customer with no deposit or no float. You pay for a flight, you take the flight, the loan lasts four hours. You remove the broker's spread and the broker's balance sheet in one swift move. Will you give something up? Sure, some. One fleet, not access to 5,000 aircraft if their phenom is down. They'll broker you one, but at least they're a broker with airplanes. And on a peak day, you'll pay a peak price out loud instead of silently through a deposit that expires. That's the trade. A fixed price you can't verify, backed by money you can't see from a company you can't inspect, or a floating price from people you can look in the eye with your own money and your own account until the airplane moves. I know which loan I'd make. I wouldn't make one. Here's where I land it. Jet cards are a good product. Wrapped around a bad structure. The product, which is guaranteed lift at a known price, is real. The structure, an unsecured and interest-free loan to a private company, spendable on arrival, governed by a contract the company wrote in a market with no deposit regulation and no one rating the count the counterparty, is one nobody would accept anywhere else in their financial life. You wouldn't lend a private company half a million dollars without seeing their books. Without security under a loan agreement, the borrower drafted. And yet every year, thousands of the most financially sophisticated people in the country do exactly that because the word on the brochure was deposit and not loan. The company that invented the jack card stopped selling it this summer because it ran out of airplanes to back it with. Everyone who kept selling didn't have that problem because they never had the airplanes. Sit with that. Ask in writing before you wire. Or, better yet, give them a credit card. Drive to the airport and ask the people with the hangar. Guys, that's our show. The loan disguised as a deposit, the reseller who started it all, and the fleet that rations it, the spread that eats the deposit, three places your money can sit, fifty million dollars at a company everyone trusted, one hidden column, 40 identical websites, the deadhead resellers, nine red flags, six things to check and the operator down the road. This one makes somebody ask where the hell their deposit sits before they wire it, then it did its job. Follow me, like the show, subscribe, leave us a review, send it to anyone you know who's holding a jet card right now. They can ask the questions today. And to the the providers who are listening. And you know what? I'm going to include the brokers this time. The seats open. Show me your escrow account, and I'll say so on the air. I'm Jason Zilberbrand. This has been the truth about the aviation market. The market doesn't care what the brochure called it, it only cares where the money is. We'll see you next week. Until then, fly safe and stay smart.