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The Single Pilot Citation is Dead | EP 60 · VREF | The Truth About the Aviation Market

• Addison: In 2008, I had 28 jets on a floor plan line, $150 million worth of inventory. And in about six weeks, half of the value was gone. Not over years, over weeks. And I learned something that spring that no appraisal textbook teaches you. A market doesn't move when the numbers change. It moves when the story people tell themselves about an airplane stops being true. For 42 years, The story about the legacy citation jet was this it's the jet you can fly yourself, your first jet, your own hands on the throttles, nobody in the right seat, your family in the back, every ad, every listing, every video with the drone shot and the music. And on September twenty ninth, twenty twenty six, that story stopped being true. The FAA ended every single pilot exemption for Part 25 citations. The 500, the 2, the S2, the 5, the Ultra, the Bravo, the Encore, the Encore Plus. 1,200 airplanes on the US Registry, and as of today, not one of them can legally leave the ground with one pilot. Here's what got my attention. See, the FAA didn't do this because of a crash. Despite all the gibber jabbering and all the chattering on the internet, it started this review back in 2024 before either of these accidents you read about even happened. It started because somebody found training companies selling single pilot sign-offs under another company's exemption, basically renting authority. And when the agency pulled the thread, it found falsified checks. Training and simulators, the rules didn't allow, and the records that didn't exist. Thirteen of the 14 of them, guys, 13 of 14 Part 61 exemption holders are now gone. Then the accident data came in. Over 18 years, these airplanes flown by one pilot crashed at roughly twice the rate of the citations that were actually built for one pilot. So I'll say it plainly, because I don't say it often. The FAA got this one right. Now, I know a lot of you own these airplanes. I know some of you are really angry. Some of you got a letter from your insurance company this morning, or you're about to. And I've been the guy holding the inventory when the rules changed, and I know exactly what that feels like. So, this episode isn't going to tell you you'll be fine. It's going to tell you what's true. Two stories side by side. The first is the system. How an exemption meant to protect pilots became a business and who that business served. And then the second story is value. What happens to 1,200 aircraft when the reason people bought them becomes illegal overnight? I spent the last week inside the registered fleet, every transaction since 2021, and the FAA's own filings. What I found is going to make some people uncomfortable, that's fine. This is VREF, the truth about the aviation market, the truth is the whole job. So the FAA posted the notice on September 25th. It was published in the F the Federal Register on the 28th and took effect today, which is the 30th. Here's who it hits. These are the citations certified under Part 25 for two pilots. The original 500 and the citation one. The citation two and the citation S2. The five and the Ultra. The Bravo. The Encore and the Encore Plus. Here's who isn't hit. The 501, the 551, the SP models that are certified under part 23, right? So you've basically got the Mustang and the whole citation jet family, which is basically the straight CJ through the CJ4. Now they were certified for one pilot from day one. So if you own one of those, relax. Nothing has changed for you today. For everyone else, three things. One, if you got a single pilot endorsement in your logbook from a training provider, that endorsement is no longer valid. It doesn't matter which provider, and it doesn't matter when you got it. Two, you now fly with a qualified second in command every flight. That's what the type certificate always said. Three, if you completed a proficient proficiency check under the exemption, The FAA says you can still use it to act as pilot in command in a two-pilot crew. So you're not starting over. You're just not alone anymore. The aircraft aren't grounded, nobody's taking your airplane. What's gone is just the ability to fly it by yourself. Single pilot citations have always been hard to fly. Two engines, jet speeds, a very busy cockpit, and nobody in the right seat to catch your mistake. The exemption system existed to make sure the pilots doing it were ready. So let's look at how it was supposed to work, and then let's look at what actually happened. So they said the exemption goes to a training provider. See, and then the provider trains you to a real standard and then checks you. Some of these exemptions were very strict. One training center's exemption required every maneuver performed single pilot for the entire check. No training to proficiency during the check. Fail one maneuver, you fail the check. What actually happened? Well, in 2024, the FAA started digging. And what started the investigation, it wasn't a crash. It was that companies without an exemption were offering training under somebody else's exemption. I mean, guys, you gotta think about that. The authority to certify pilots was basically being rented out. They said the FA would oversee the training and the check. But what happened was that the FAA found incomplete records. It found required flight training done in simulator devices the exemption didn't allow, and it found designated pilot examiners giving improper checks, including falsifying records. So the FA pulled the designee auth authority of the examiners who falsified the records. They said these were a handful of bad actors. But what actually happened is that There were 14 Part 61 exemption holders, and 13 of them were denied an extension or had their exemption rescinded. 13 out of 14. Guys, I don't care how you skin the cat, that's not a few bad apples, that's what an orchard looks like. And here's the flaw that made all of it possible. The exemption belonged to the training company, but the relief was used by the pilot. Once you had the endorsement, the training company had no ongoing relationship with you. The FAA says it plainly. When an exemption expired or got pulled, the pilot probably didn't even know and may have kept flying alone with no legal authority to do so. So, how many of these airplanes have been flown illegally? That's the question. And nobody knows, not the FAA, not the owners. That's the problem with the system. Nobody was watching. So I want to be careful because both of these accidents are still under investigation. The NTSB has not determined a probable cause in either one, and people died, including children and their families, are still living with it. So I'm going to stick to what's in the public record. So on San in San Diego, on May 22nd of 2025, a Part 25 citation flown single pilot had six people on board that were killed, and then eight people on the ground were injured. The FAA says the pilot had received an improper check about six months earlier from an examiner employed by one of the Part 61 exemption holders. See, that's the paper system failing. A pilot got signed off, who, according to the FAA, should never have been. And then the one that I think everybody knows about, which is the Statesville, North Carolina crash on December 18th, 2025, which was a citation too. Seven people were killed, including former NASCAR driver Greg Biffle, his wife, their two children, and the pilots. The preliminary report is public. The pilot in the left seat was very experienced. He was an airline transport pilot. He had 17,000 hours, and type ratings on everything from a 737 to an A three fifty. His citation type rating carried a limitation, printed on it. Second in command is required. Nothing in the public record shows a single pilot authorization, and the FA says the airplane was operating without a qualified second in command, and that the person in the right seat was a private pilot with 175 hours, all in single engine aircraft. The NTSB says he was not qualified to act as second in command. So Statesville isn't the exemption failing, it's something different, and I'd argue worse. It's a very experienced pilot flying without the second pilot, his own certificate required, because in his corner of the market, flying these airplanes alone had become normal. One more thing about that airplane, because it's the kind of airplane this whole episode is about. It was built in 1981. In the nine years before the crash, it changed hands eleven times. Twice it was bought. And resold on the same day with a pass-through LLC in the middle. It spent 19 months on the market before the last owner bought it, which was March of 2025, nine months before it went down. I'm not saying any of that caused anything. The NTSB will decide that. I won't. I am saying this is what a 40-year-old aircraft looks like on paper when it's traded like a used car, constantly, cheaply, and by people who mostly never meet. You have two accidents. Thirteen people dead, eight more injured on the ground. One shows the paperwork failing. The other shows the culture. And when that happens, the FAA acts. That's what we got on Monday. Okay, let me pause for a minute because what comes next is numbers, and I want you to have yours before I give you everybody else's. If you own one of these aircraft, there's a question you're going to be asked in the next 30 days by your insurance underwriter. By your lender if you have one. Certainly by your spouse. And definitely by the broker who calls you Friday afternoon. The question is what is it worth now? And here's the trap. If you go looking for that answer on a listing site, you'll get a free widget that averages asking prices. Asking prices from sellers who set them last spring when the story was still true. That number isn't a value, it's a wish. And if you price your airplane to it, you'll join the hundred and thirty-eight that are already sitting on the open market. See, VREF doesn't work from asking prices. We work from closings, real money that actually changed hands on real aircraft with the serial numbers and the actual logbooks. Every value we publish is one I'd sign my name to in front of a judge because I do, and I do that for a living. So here's what I want you to do. Go to VREF.com, pull the value on your airplane today. Before the market reprices it for you. And then I want you to pull it again in 90 days. The gap between those numbers is going to be the most honest thing anybody tells you about this rule. And if you're a lender or an insurance company or a fleet operator holding more than one of these, call me. We built a special report on this fleet, all 1,200 aircraft, by model, by age, by who owns them, and what they're actually doing. It's the map. Of exactly where this lands. VREF.com or the link in the show notes at the end. Okay, let me show you what I found. Because this is the second story and it's all about values. First, how big is this? The VREF analysis of the registered fleet puts it at 1,212 aircraft on the US Civil Register. That's a small slice of the business jet fleet, but it's most of the entry level used jet market. These are citations people buy normally as their first jet. And the primary use case for a lot of them was exactly what just went away, an owner flying his own airplane alone. You don't need a survey to know that. Fourteen training companies built a business on signing off single pilots. The ad sold it. The video sold it. That was the airplane. Think about what that means, really. The rule didn't change the aircraft, it changed the buyer. The guy who wanted a jet he could fly himself on weekends. just left this market because now he's shopping for a Mustang or a CJ. And the cost of every trip went up as well. And not by a little. And run the math. For an owner flying a citation to 60 some hours a year, VREF puts the direct operating cost at about $1800 an hour. Now I want you to add a second pilot. Not by the hour, because nobody's going to rent a pilot by the hour, but by the trip because that's how it actually works. See, he flies out with you. He sits in the hotel for three days while you do your business or go on vacation with your family. And he flies home with you. So you got the day rate, hotels, per diems for food, airline tickets to position him if he wants to go home, the training, so your insurance company will accept him. And if you run that across your typical owner trips, and it's about $100,000, your direct direct operating cost just went from $1,800 to over $3,000 an hour. It doubled. And that's before your underwriter reprices the policy for a two-pilot aircraft. So do values drop? I don't know how you can argue they won't. Here's where the market already stood going into Monday. Older citations. This is the older half. Your 500s, your ones, your twos, your s twos. There are 1400 aircraft 418 aircraft. 15% are for sale. And the average time on an airframe is about 8,800 hours. The newer half, which is your fives, your ultras, your bravos, your encores, your encore pluses, there are 794 of those. 10% are for sale. And the average total time on that fleet's about 5,800 hours. And then you got the unaffected ones, which are the citation one SPs and two SPs. Guys, there's only 217 of those aircraft. There's 11% of them for sale. The average total time on one of those planes is 6,700 hours. The older half is where the damage lands. One in five S2s is for sale right now. And it's at this year's sales pace. That's almost seven years of inventory, guys. The citation two has about two and a half years of inventory sitting on the market. And that was before the rule took away its most likely buyer. Now I want to be straight with you because that's what this show is. The market for these airplanes was already slow. That was before Monday. Sales of the older effect and models are running about forty-five percent below last year. But the single pilot versions, the ones this rule doesn't touch, are down even more, about fifty-three percent. So the slowdown this year is about age, not regulation. It's the same generational split we've covered in episode fifty-five. The old airplanes were already dying. Go back and listen to it now. What Monday does is Is take away the floor. See, here's two more numbers. VREF counts at least 22 of these airplanes bought by parts companies since 2021, including Encores, which was built in the mid-2000s. When a parts buyer can pay more for an airplane than an operator can, that airplane is worth more in pieces than flying. The parts buyers were in this market before the rule as well. And the dealers, well let's talk about them. They're holding 57 of these aircraft in an inventory as of today. Only fifteen of those are listed for sale. That leaves forty two aircraft sitting off market. Let's watch what happens to those. Here's how we'll measure this. The Citation 2 and the Citation 2 SP are nearly the same airplane. One can be flown solo, one can't. Starting today, the gap in the value between them is the price of flying alone. As of today, V Rev values the on the 500, the 2 and the S2 are flat since our September 1st revision. So there's no panic, no drop yet. But the new values are coming out in a couple months, and I can pretty much guarantee you there's going to be a major adjustment. So These airplanes trade often enough, you know, that those values were stable going into this. And that's the baseline. And now we watch the spread open and we're going to report it every quarter until it settles because that's what we do. So these are the airplanes you'll see all over Instagram. You see them all over TikTok. You see them all over Facebook. And I want to talk about who sells these aircraft because I think it's important for a lot of you. As I said, it's your first jet. You used to be able to fly it by yourself, no more. You see a lot of these broken up into fractional shares. You see a lot of timeshares, a lot of co-ownership. There are Facebook posts all over the place about it. There's a whole marketing machine built around the idea that one pilot alone can fly a citation. So, VREF looked at who actually trades them. We went through every retail transaction in the effective models since 2021. More than 1,400 companies on one side of a deal or the other. Most of them show up one time. Because they're an owner buying and owner selling. But there was one company that stands out, a single dealer who was on the side of about one in 13 of these transactions, which is a big number because that was over five years. And then more than the next three firms combined as well. It brought almost exactly as many as it sold across eight of the nine affected models. That's not a broker, that's a principal buying airplanes and turning them. Now I want to be precise. Being the biggest dealer in a market isn't wrongdoing. Nothing in the data says the company did anything wrong. I'm not even going to name them today because I don't think they had anything to do with any of this. But the FAA has told us the system that puts pilots into these airplanes was broken. Exemptions rented out. The checks were falsified. We know 13 or 14 trainers that provided it are gone. So here are the questions somebody should be answering. And I'll start with the first one. Who were the 14 Part 61 exemption holders? Because the FAA hasn't published the list. Maybe they will by the time this airs. Hopefully somebody will let me know. Which examiners lost their authority? And whose customers did they check? Anyone know? Who sold the airplanes that pilots with those endorsements went on to fly? How many ads for these airplanes promise single pilot operation to buyers who are never going to be legal doing it? We're pulling on those threads. When we can put documents behind an answer, you'll hear it here first. If you know something, and I know my listeners are really good at doing research, let me know what you find. Okay, let's flip the switch because I want to talk about what you should do if you're an owner. Because if you own one of these airplanes, here's a list that you really need to write down. One, the obvious. Stop flying it alone today. Your endorsement is void. There's no grace period in the notice. Don't do anything silly. Two, call your insurance broker. Ask what your policy says now about crew requirements and what the premium looks like with a qualified second pilot. Guys, don't find out after a claim. Three, line up a second in command, a contract pilot, a management company, or a pilot you train up to be legal. Price it per trip, not per year. Four, run the real numbers, guys. Take your annual annual hours, add the crew cost, and look at your cost per hour, honestly. That number tells you whether you should keep this aircraft. Five, know your three options. Crew up, keep flying, sell it, or step into an airplane certified for one pilot, which is a 501, a 551 equipped for single pilot operation, a Mustang or a CJ. And if you're selling, price it right the first time. The market just lost a lot of buyers. A lot. The worst thing you can do is chase an aspirational asking price from a free listening widget while your airplane sits for a year. Price it at VREF and it sells in 90 days or less. And if you're a buyer, this is your market. Just make sure you're buying the airplane for the mission it can legally fly with the crew it legally needs. One more thing before I wrap this up. And it's for the people who don't own one of these airplanes. If you've listened to this You've noticed something. Everything I told you today came from three places: the FA's own filing, the NTSB's own report, and the registered fleet, transaction by transaction. That VREF analyzed ourselves. Nobody handed me a press release. Nobody sold me an ad. I didn't do any pump and dump. I'm not sponsored. And that's not how most of what you read about this market gets made, because most of it is written by people who need the sellers to keep buying pages. I don't. VREF has one customer and it's the person who needs to know what an airplane's actually worth. Whether it's a buyer, a lender, an insurance company, owners want the truth before they sign. So if that's you, do me a favor, subscribe to this show because we're going to follow this fleet for the next year, and you'll hear the numbers here first. And if you're a professional, like a broker or a banker or an underwriter or an appraiser, Get yourself a VREF subscription and stop guessing about these numbers. And if you know somebody who owns a citation too and hasn't heard the news yet, because they've been under a rock, send them this episode today before they try and fly it. And let me leave you with the thing I keep coming back to. In 1984, the FAA said there was no data proving one pilot was less safe than two in these airplanes. That was true, there wasn't. So they granted the exemption. And they said the exemption itself would generate the data. It did. It took forty-two years. It took thirteen lives. It took two crashes still under investigation. A training system that 13 out of 14 providers couldn't run honestly. But the data came in, and guess what? The FA read it. And on Thursday in September, it did the thing regulators almost never do. It admitted the experiment failed and it shut it down. The industry groups are upset about the notice. Immediate effect. No warning. And they have a point about the process. I can't argue that. But I'd ask them the question nobody once asked. Where was everyone for the two years the FAA was finding falsified checks? Where were all these organizations then? Where were the people who sell these airplanes? Who trained the pilots? Who write the insurance? The information was in a public docket. Nobody wanted to be the one to say it. So I'll say it. The single pilot legacy citation was a story, a good story. It sold a lot of airplanes and it was built on a piece of paper that stopped meaning anything a long time before Monday. Here's what happens now. 1200 aircraft, the newer ones, the ultras, the bravos, the encores have young airframes and relatively low hour hours. They'll find crews and they'll adjust. I guarantee it. The older ones, you know, the 500s, the twos, the s twos, we're already leaving. One in five is for sale today. This doesn't really just kill them. It just stops pretending that death isn't imminent. And values are going to move, not the whole market. This slice. I told you in episode 55 that the market split in half by generation. Today the split got a regulation behind it. We'll measure it the honest way. A citation two against a two SP, same airframe, one legal to fly alone, one not, and I'm going to report the spread every quarter until it settles. Guys, if you own one of these airplanes, I'm sorry. And I really do mean that. I've been on the wrong side of a rule change with the inventory in my name, and it's a terrible feeling. But the worst thing you can do right now is wait for the story to come back because it isn't coming back. Get your number, make your decision quickly, price it at VREF, and it sells. Because the buyers who are left are the ones who are always going to fly it with two. One pilot was never enough. It just took 42 years to prove it. This has been VREF, the Truth About the Aviation Market. I'm Jason. See you next time. Until then, fly safe and stay smart.