Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF What Happens to Your Money When a Flight School Fails? A parent takes out a home-equity line. A 19-year-old starts chasing a lifelong dream. A lender wires tens of thousands of dollars to a flight school. The school has experienced instructors, manufacturer affiliations, airline partnerships, national press coverage—and every outward sign that the family did its homework. Then the doors close. And the money [...]

Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF What Really Happens to Your Money When You Buy a Jet Card Last episode was about escrow. Why no rational aircraft buyer wires eight figures directly to a seller. Why a neutral third party holds the money. Why structure matters more than trust. Then Jason asks an uncomfortable question: Why will many of those same sophisticated buyers wire $250,000, $500,000, even $1 million directly [...]

Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF Somewhere today, someone may wire $40 million to an aircraft escrow company in Oklahoma City they’ve never visited, run by people they’ve never met, in an industry with no dedicated federal regulator and no government guarantee behind the account. And they’ll probably sleep just fine. That same person may spend 20 minutes disputing a $90 credit-card charge. Why? Because aviation has built an extraordinary [...]

Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF An aircraft owner has been paying into an engine program for 11 years. Every invoice paid. More than $1 million contributed. The entire airplane is now worth roughly $3 million. And the overhaul those payments are supposed to protect him from is still four to five years away. So he asks Jason Zilberbrand a deceptively simple question: “At this point, am I buying protection—or [...]

September 1 Values Are In — and the Numbers Don’t Match the Headlines Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF The September 1 VREF value revision is complete. And for the first time this year, Jason Zilberbrand can put both halves of the market together: Transaction volume. And: Aircraft values. The result is not a simple bull market or bear market. It is a market that has split sharply by aircraft [...]

Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF One of the most recognizable names in general aviation appears to have changed in a way almost nobody announced. Jason Zilberbrand discovered it by clicking a tab on an ordinary corporate website. At the top of the page: Luscombe Mooney Aircraft Company. One masthead. Two historic aircraft brands. One of those brands supports a fleet of roughly 11,000 Mooney aircraft. The other belonged to [...]

Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF Two numbers: $656,688. And: $1,101,694. Same asset class. Same week. Nearly identical examples. One number reflects the statistical benchmark built from actual recorded transactions. The other is what a seller is asking today. The gap? Approximately 68%. And there are examples asking even more. The asset is a Ferrari 812 GTS—but this episode is not really about Ferraris. It is about something aviation professionals [...]

Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF An $8 million Citation CJ4 is sitting on a ramp. The owner isn’t flying it. He isn’t even in the country. A line guy hooks up a tug, gets distracted, and tows the airplane into a hangar improperly. Forty seconds later, the damage is done. The aircraft is repaired correctly, returned to service, and made completely airworthy. But when it comes out the other side, [...]

Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF The Challenger 3500 is routinely presented as proof that the business aircraft market is on fire. There are waiting lists. There are no aircraft publicly available. Buyers are supposedly willing to pay premiums. And brokers frequently cite the model as evidence of an exceptionally strong super-midsize market. There is just one problem: The Challenger 3500 has only completed one known owner-to-owner resale in the history [...]

Podcast: The Truth About the Market Host: Jason Zilberbrand, President of VREF Aviation professionals scrutinize maintenance invoices, fuel bills, appraisals, and aircraft operating costs down to the last dollar. But how closely do they examine the organizations collecting their membership dues? In this episode of The Truth About the Market, Jason goes somewhere most aviation media will not go on the record. He opens the public IRS filings of the industry’s largest alphabet organizations and asks [...]