Matt Thurber, editor-in-chief at AIN Media Group, has been flying since 1975 and writing about aviation since 1978 and now has the best job in the world, running editorial operations for Aviation International News, Business Jet Traveler, and FutureFlight.aero. In addition to working as an A&amp;P mechanic on everything from Piper Cubs to turboprops, Matt taught flying at his father’s flight school in Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1980s, flew for an aircraft owner/pilot, and for two summer seasons hunted swordfish near the George’s Banks off the East Coast from a Piper Super Cub. An ATP certificated fixed-wing pilot and CFII and commercial helicopter pilot, Matt is type-rated in the Citation 500 and Gulfstream V/550. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Matt and his team cover the entire aviation scene including business aircraft, helicopters, avionics, safety, manufacturing, charter, fractionals, technology, air transport, advanced air mobility, defense, and other subjects of interest to AIN, BJT, and FutureFlight readers.

Editor-in-Chief

Matt Thurber

Aircraft services group Aery Aviation has challenged the process through which the FAA seeks to impose a large civil penalty for alleged violations on flights from five to six years ago. In a statement, the company has maintained that the agency does not have jurisdiction in the matter and also claims the FAA’s charges include significant factual inaccuracies.
On Dec. 21, 2025, the FAA filed a notice of proposed civil penalty against Aery for flights the agency alleges were conducted with unairworthy aircraft. The proposed penalty of $15,744,352.50, among the highest ever for a non-airline operator, covers 431 flights between July 2021 and April 2022.
The allegations relate to banner- and target-towing flights in Learjets for the U.S. Navy “without performing the required maintenance or maintaining the required documentation,” according to the FAA. “The equipment installation required the aircraft to be placed in a restricted category under which they could not be flown over densely populated areas, in congested airways, or near airports that serve passengers without an FAA waiver. Additionally, Aery was required to document that maintenance personnel had approved the aircraft for return to service following the installations and placement into the restricted category.”
Because most of these flights were near the Class D airspace surrounding Newport-News Williamsburg Airport (KPHF) in Virginia , the FAA accused Aery of careless or reckless operations “so as to endanger lives or property of others.”
The FAA’s notice gave the operator 30 days to respond to the proposed civil penalty, which Aery did, and it followed this with an informal conference with the FAA on April 7.&nbsp;
What struck Aery president Scott Beale as strange was that in 2022 the FAA had raised questions about some Aery flights for a possible enforcement action. According to Aery, it responded to the 2022 issues, and believed these were resolved because the FAA told the company that it didn’t need any more information. There was no further communication from the FAA, according to Beale.
However, 38 months later, without any warning, the FAA decided to file the $15.74 million proposed penalty. Surprisingly, Beale only found out about the penalty when AIN asked Aery Aviation about it.&nbsp;
<h2>Junk Mail Suspected</h2>
“I thought this must be a phishing attempt or a joke,” he explained. “I hit delete, and I got rid of it. About an hour later, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, that was very specific.’ So I went into my delete box, and I looked at the email address, and sure enough, it was a real email address. So then I called and said, ‘Where did you hear this or find this?’ And they led me to a link, and that link was the FAA website where I saw the proposed civil penalty letter for the very first time.
“I hadn’t heard from [the FAA] in 38 months. You can imagine, three days before Christmas, we’re a small business, a $15.7 million proposed penalty, the largest ever that I’ve seen on record for a charter company. It took another four months for Aery—after spending lots of dollars in legal [fees] and other things—to even get a conference scheduled.”
In a May 26, 2026 letter to transportation secretary Sean Duffy, Aery asked for some reforms at the FAA. “During this extended period of silence, Aery had no notice that enforcement action was either pending or imminent, no opportunity to address developing concerns (because it was of the belief that FAA had no outstanding, unaddressed concerns), and no ability to mitigate the harm that would flow from the eventual issuance of a $15 million penalty notice.
“The consequences of this delay have been severe and tangible. The [civil penalty], once issued, became a matter of record. Prospective clients and contracting parties, including companies that had been evaluating Aery for substantial service contracts, learned of the enforcement action and determined that Aery presented an unacceptable regulatory risk. Those contracts were lost. That business did not return. The harm to Aery’s reputation and commercial relationships resulting from this action is real, documented, and ongoing.
“Timely enforcement serves both the agency and the regulated community. An FAA that goes silent for more than three years and then issues a $15 million penalty based on significant errors of fact and law needs immediate reform.”
During the April information meeting, Aery offered information that it believes makes the FAA’s civil penalty case unenforceable. It summarized this information in the letter to Duffy, arguing that it had showed the public aircraft operations (PAO) designation letter from the U.S. Navy to the FAA in 2021.&nbsp;
According to Aery, “Flights conducted as PAO under the authority and jurisdiction of the U.S. Navy are not subject to FAA certification and regulatory oversight in the manner the agency has sought to apply here. Accordingly, those flights should never have been included in the [civil penalty’s] penalty calculation.”
“The fleet of Learjet aircraft referenced in the proposed civil penalty letter only had one mission, and that was a government contract,” Beale explained, and that’s how the Learjets were operated. Aery did not fly the Learjets under Part 135 charter operations, and it has a letter from the U.S. Navy, he added, “saying that all flights, for the purposes of the special operations that we’re doing for the Navy are categorized under public&nbsp; aircraft operations and, in that case, the FAA has no jurisdiction.”
The FAA claims that when Aery was flying the Learjets under Part 91 civilian operations, for example, for training or positioning flights, they carried modifications such as hard points to mount Navy equipment that required the aircraft to have restricted-category airworthiness certificates. But during the informal conference, Aery showed the FAA “the aircraft configuration logs establishing that the aircraft operated by Aery during the relevant period did not have the modifications that the FAA alleged,” according to the Duffy letter. “No underwing pods. No stores during civilian operations and under the FAA jurisdiction. No configuration changes requiring restricted certification.”
<h2>Navy Rules Apply&nbsp;</h2>
To support its position that public aircraft operations for the U.S. Navy don’t require FAA sanction, Beale pointed out that the FAA itself used that public-use type of operation to allow NASA and U.S. Navy pilots to fly four Northrop F-5 Tiger II fighter jets during the recent July 4 flyover event in Washington, D.C.
According to an FAA statement provided to CBS News: “The FAA conducted a standard safety review for a privately owned, experimental aircraft. Once the aircraft was transferred to NASA, it became a ‘public use’ (or government) aircraft. The responsibility for the operation falls to that specific government agency, not the FAA.”&nbsp;
“This is the same PAO designation that Aery had for its flights from the Navy,” Aery pointed out.
Aery’s final rebuttal, outlined in the Duffy letter, explained that hundreds of flights that the civil penalty action attributed to Aery weren’t even flown by aircraft it owned or operated. “The documentary record presented by Aery at the informal conference conclusively establishes that these nine aircraft were not owned or operated by Aery Aviation during the period in question. Aery acquired these aircraft weeks or months after the dates of the flights cited in the [civil penalty]. Aery cannot be penalized for operations it did not conduct, on aircraft it did not own.”
Specifically, Aery started buying the Learjets in July 2021 and completed the purchase two months later. The above-mentioned flights that the FAA claim that Aery operated took place in June, before Aery had acquired any of the jets.&nbsp;
After it completed the purchase of the 12 Learjets, Beale said, “The sole purpose [of these airplanes] was to operate them on a U.S. Navy contract. Period. End of story. Under PAO. They only had one mission, and that was a government contract.
“There are about 550 flights that the FAA is assessing a proposed civil penalty. Of that, nearly 500 were under PAO authority with U.S. Navy PAO flight numbers. The other 40 to 50 flights were under Part 91, but…we didn’t require a restricted-category certificate because we were either ferrying the aircraft or doing training, just basic takeoff and landing and instrument training in the airplanes, [they] didn’t require a restricted-category certificate for that. So they’re trying to assess a fine for flights that didn’t even require restricted [category], and that’s about 10% of the total flights. The rest of them are PAO.”
If Aery had been operating these Learjets as a civilian commercial operation towing targets or carrying pods without a PAO authorization, then it would have had to seek restricted-category certification, but the company insists that wasn’t the case. “When the U.S. Navy customer asks us to go operate with pods or with targets, or with banners, they issue to us a PAO flight number and Navy interim flight clearance airworthiness,” he said, “and then we go operate the aircraft under PAO.”
<h2>Reputational Damage to Businesses</h2>
Besides removal of what Aery believes is an unjustified civil penalty, Beale hopes this case will result in some changes at the FAA, including improving the response time when questions are raised and answered and when promises appear to have been made. “The FAA is supposed to be incentivized to operate quickly,” Beale said. “It’s not supposed to put companies out of business.
“This is a frequent complaint, that the FAA advertises this penalty, puts this big number out, and when you look at some old GAO [Government Accountability Office] reports, most of those get negotiated down to pennies on the dollar. But you get this reputational damage in the meantime, and the settlement’s always quiet and private, and there doesn’t seem to be any accountability for the agency or any changes being made. We’re very interested in not only resolving Aery’s case in an administrative fashion, but making sure that there are some reforms to the process because it does seem backwards.”
The U.S. Navy likely has an interest in keeping companies like Aery in business to provide mission-critical services to the branch, and it has told the FAA that Aery was working under a PAO. In fact, Beale said, “We’re still providing these services today with the same exact airplanes and the same exact documentation that we had in 2021. We’re doing it safely. We’re doing it to the pleasure and government satisfaction, training the warfighter, and it’s infuriating that our small little business is under this big black cloud.”
As for the FAA, it declined to answer questions from AIN about the 38-month delay and alleged safety issues surrounding Aery. “The case is still open. We don’t comment on open enforcement cases,” the FAA responded.

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