Price the same trip through a few different charter operators sometime, just to see what comes back. Same route, same class of light jet, same weather — and the number never really moves for a reason that has anything to do with the airplane. It moves because of everything wrapped around the airplane: the operator's certificate, the crew on their payroll, the person answering the phone, the empty leg they flew just to get the airplane to you in the first place. By the time the quote lands, the aircraft itself is maybe a third of what you're actually paying for.
That's the whole founding logic of Palm Aero Group, and it fits on a napkin: the aircraft is the aircraft, the pilot is the pilot, and everything an industry stacks between the two of them is margin wearing a service uniform. Charter isn't a scam — for plenty of people it's exactly the right product, and later in this post I'll tell you when I think it is. But it prices in a middleman whether you need one that day or not. I didn't set out to build a better middleman. I set out to remove the middle.
The easy path was the one I didn't take
If we wanted to compete with those operators, the playbook already existed: get a Part 135 certificate, put pilots on staff, build a booking desk, market the destinations. That's a real business, and it's the one most of this industry is in. I looked at it and decided I didn't want to run it — not because it's dishonest, but because every piece of it exists to sell you a trip, and every piece of it costs money that ends up on your invoice whether you use it or not.
So Palm Aero is built the opposite way. I own one aircraft — a Citation CJ1 — and I lease it to you under Part 91. You hire your own pilot. You hold operational control. You pay direct costs instead of retail. None of that is an accident or a workaround; it's four deliberate decisions, and each one is a "no" to something the charter model depends on. Here's what each no actually buys you.
No Part 135 certificate
Holding a charter certificate means the FAA considers you the operator of every flight you sell — which means you're in the business of selling flights, and everything that comes with that: training records, ops specs, a duty desk, a certificate to maintain. That overhead is legitimate, and it's also expensive, and it's baked into every charter quote whether the flight is routine or not. We don't hold that certificate, which means, legally, we're not allowed to sell you a flight at all — only the airplane. That's not a limitation I apologize for. It's the mechanism that keeps the pricing honest. When there's no certificate to fund, there's nothing to fund it with except your rent, your fuel, and your pilot. Rental company hands you the keys; you do the driving.
No crews
Charter operators employ or contract pilots and assign them to your trip — that employment relationship is precisely what makes them the operator, and precisely what you're paying a premium for: someone else's payroll, someone else's scheduling puzzle, someone else's crew-legality paperwork. We don't employ pilots, and we never put one in the left seat for you. You hire your own — the same person, trip after trip, if that's how you want it — and you pay them directly, typically $1,000–1,500 a day. That's a real cost, and it's now a cost you manage instead of one buried in someone else's rate card. What it buys you is a pilot who is actually yours: not whoever the dispatch software assigned at 6 a.m., but someone you chose, briefed, and trust with your family or your deal. If you've ever chartered and drawn a stranger in the left seat on a trip that mattered, you already know what that's worth.
No selling trips
This is the one people find hardest to believe, so I'll say it plainly: we're not allowed to sell you a flight to anywhere. Not a destination, not a seat, not an outcome we deliver for you. The offer is always the aircraft. What that restriction hands back to you is control that's genuinely yours and not ours to take away — the go/no-go, the routing, the schedule, all made by you or the pilot you hired, not dispatched to you from someone's scheduling desk. Under a charter, the operator holds operational control and you're a passenger in the legal sense, however comfortable the seat. Under a dry lease, you're the operator. We're the landlord.
No call center
There's no script here and nobody checking your dates against fifteen other customers who want the same tail that week. There's one owner — me — answering the phone, and one aircraft, kept the way I'd keep it if it were the only airplane I had. Which it is. If you call wanting to fly, you're not competing with strangers for the airplane; the only question is whether you and your pilot can be ready. That's not a promise that we're always available — scheduling here is non-exclusive, you request and we confirm, the same as it would be anywhere, because a guarantee is exactly the kind of language that turns a lease into something that looks like a charter operation. It's a promise that when you do fly, you know precisely what you're flying, because it's the same airplane, every time, minded by the person who owns it.
What the four no's add up to
Strip the certificate, the crew payroll, the booking desk, and the trip-selling out of an aircraft's cost structure, and what's left is direct cost — rent, fuel, the pilot you hired. That's not a discount we're extending you. It's what's actually left once the middle of the transaction is gone. If you want to see that math laid out line by line against a real charter invoice, we've done it in Dry lease vs. charter: the honest math, and you can run your own route — with your own assumptions — in the cost estimator.
I should also be straight about who this isn't for. If you fly two or three times a year, or you want someone else to hold every piece of responsibility for the trip — the crew, the go/no-go, the weather call — charter is honestly the better product, and I'll tell you that on the phone before I'll tell you anything else. Dry leasing rewards people who fly enough, and want enough control, that direct cost and direct responsibility beat retail and none. If that's not you yet, it might be someday, and I'm happy to talk about the math either way.
And if what you actually need is a flown-for-you trip — someone else's crew, someone else's certificate, someone else's liability — I'll say what I'd say if you called: that's a charter, and we're deliberately not a charter company. If a flown-for-you trip is what you need, I'm happy to point you to a certificated Part 135 operator.
The kind of company I'd want to lease from
I own the aircraft I lease. That's a small sentence, but it carries the whole point: I don't get to hide behind a fleet of tail numbers or a maintenance department three states away, and neither do you. If the CJ1 isn't ready, I know it first, because it's mine. That's not a marketing angle — it's just what happens when you remove the middle and there's nobody left standing in it but the owner and the lessee. If that's the kind of arrangement you've been looking for, here's exactly how the structure works, and here's the airplane itself. If you're still sorting out how a dry lease differs from charter in the first place, start with the plain-English explainer — two minutes, no jargon.
This article describes how Palm Aero Group is structured and why; it is general information, not legal or tax advice, and not an offer. Palm Aero Group is not a charter operator and holds no Part 135 certificate; it does not sell air transportation, provide flight crew, or hold operational control on a lessee's behalf. Under a dry lease the lessee holds operational control and operates under 14 CFR Part 91, and is responsible for hiring, engaging, and paying flight crew directly. Prospective lessees should confirm any lease arrangement with qualified aviation counsel — see our resources page for further reading, or get in touch with questions.