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 am I funding somebody else’s overhaul?”
That question is uncomfortable because almost everyone with an economic interest in engine programs sits on one side of it.
Program providers sell the coverage.
OEMs operate many of the programs.
Brokers like aircraft that are easier to finance and sell.
MROs eventually perform the work.
Jason comes at it from a different angle—and with unusual experience. He helped found JSSI and has spent decades valuing the aircraft these programs are supposed to protect.
His conclusion is not that engine programs are bad.
Far from it.
For the right owner, at the right point in an aircraft’s life, an engine program can be one of the most valuable financial tools in aviation.
But it is still a financial instrument.
It has a term.
A counterparty.
An escalating cost.
And a break-even point.
Episode 56 is about finding yours.
In this episode:
- Why Jason describes an engine program, structurally, as hourly payments today in exchange for an unsecured promise later
- The difference between programs that maintain funded reserves and structures that operate more like pooled pay-as-you-go systems
- Why the word “full” in full coverage may not mean what an owner assumes it means
- The exclusions owners need to understand before an engine event—not after one
- Why transfer fees are more than an administrative detail
- How annual escalation can dramatically change the lifetime cost of enrollment
- Why shopping programs based only on the hourly rate can miss the most important economics in the contract
- What owners may be able to negotiate before enrollment
- What VREF’s fleet data reveals about how common engine-program enrollment actually is
- Why enrollment appears to track financeability much more closely than many owners realize
- How lender requirements can create part of the resale premium associated with an enrolled aircraft
- Why engine-program concentration often follows the engine manufacturer, not the aircraft brand
- What happens when one provider effectively controls the enrolled fleet for a particular powerplant
- Why the maturity profile of program obligations is effectively invisible to outsiders
- What decades of transaction history reveal about enrollment decay as aircraft age
- Why roughly one in five buyers may walk away from an existing program at closing
- What happened to transfer retention during the 2020–2022 boom—and what changed when financing returned
- Why some owners abandon programs surprisingly close to the overhaul event they have spent years funding
- The practical threshold Jason uses to determine when continuing to pay may no longer make financial sense
- How that calculation changes for a seller, keeper, and buyer
- Why lapsing should be treated as effectively permanent
And the six questions Jason says every enrolled owner should ask their program provider—in writing
Only about one aircraft in four is enrolled
One of the most surprising findings in VREF’s data:
Across 376 business jet and turboprop models, representing 42,456 operating airframes, VREF identified 12,317 aircraft enrolled in an engine maintenance program.
That’s roughly 26% of the fleet.
So despite how often people say “everybody is on a program,” enrollment is actually the minority position across the broader market.
But it is heavily concentrated.
In financeable midlife jet fleets, penetration can reach 75%, 80%, or even 90%+.
As aircraft age into markets dominated by cash buyers, enrollment can collapse.
Jason’s interpretation:
Engine-program enrollment is not purely a maintenance decision. It is also a credit decision.
An unenrolled aircraft may lose more than maintenance protection.
It may lose access to a large portion of the financed buyer pool.
The market is more concentrated than it looks
The second major finding is that program concentration tends to follow the engine.
In multiple fleets, one provider controls an overwhelming share of enrolled aircraft.
Jason cites examples where dominant-provider penetration reaches roughly:
98%
97%
95%
91%
90%
depending on the aircraft and engine combination.
The implication is bigger than individual owner choice.
If a single program dominates an aircraft type, one escalation change, renewal adjustment, or coverage revision can change the cost of ownership for a large portion of that fleet at essentially the same time.
That is not an allegation about any provider.
It is a market-structure risk.
The chart nobody outside the programs can build
Jason wanted to answer another question:
When will the enrolled fleet actually hit its major engine events?
The data needed to build that maturity curve—engine-by-engine time since overhaul and remaining time to event—is not available through public registries.
In VREF’s attempt, nearly 90% of enrolled aircraft could not be placed precisely on that timeline.
Program providers can see their own maturity schedules.
Owners, appraisers, lenders, and outside analysts generally cannot.
That information gap matters because many owners are making long-duration payments without visibility into the broader pool of obligations those payments may support.
Jason’s challenge to providers:
Publish the lapse and maturity data.
If the economics work the way the programs claim, transparency should strengthen the product.
What owners actually do
VREF’s transaction history shows a slow, steady erosion of enrollment as aircraft age.
Recent transaction vintages remain enrolled at rates above 80%.
Older vintages steadily decline.
By roughly age 25, about half of the observed book is gone.
There is no single mass exit.
Owners appear to reach the decision gradually, one airplane at a time.
The clearest decision point is closing.
When an enrolled aircraft changes hands, roughly eight out of ten buyers keep the program.
About one in five walks away.
Retention is strongest among newer, financeable aircraft and weaker among older aircraft purchased for cash.
Again, financing appears to play a major role.
And some owners walk away right before the event
VREF identified 3,169 lapsed enrollments, excluding aircraft that exited the fleet.
For 1,058 of them, enough engine-time information existed to estimate proximity to the next major event.
Among those:
469 had more than 2,000 hours remaining.
561 lapsed inside 2,000 hours.
290 lapsed inside 1,000 hours.
And 127 lapsed inside 500 hours of the overhaul they had spent years funding.
Jason does not claim the data can prove why each owner left.
But walking away that close to the expected payout suggests that some decisions may have been driven by difficult economics at sale, renewal, transfer, buy-in, or event settlement.
The threshold test
Jason reduces the decision to two sides of the ledger.
Number 1: What will staying enrolled cost you?
Calculate:
Every remaining hourly contribution
plus
Expected escalation
plus
Any shortfall or pro-rata obligation
plus relevant transfer costs if you expect to sell.
Number 2: What are you actually getting in return?
Consider:
The resale premium associated with enrollment
plus
The value of transferring catastrophic maintenance risk
adjusted for
The exclusions and expenses you would still bear yourself.
When the remaining cost materially exceeds the economic protection and resale value you are receiving, Jason argues that you may no longer be buying protection.
You may be subsidizing the pool.
But the answer changes dramatically depending on who you are.
If you’re selling
If you plan to exit within roughly two years, you probably will not own the eventual engine event.
Your primary question becomes:
Does staying enrolled add more to the sale price than the remaining contributions and transfer costs?
On financeable aircraft, the answer may very well be yes.
On older, low-value aircraft trading primarily for cash, the enrollment premium may disappear.
If you’re keeping the airplane
The residual-value premium matters much less.
Your question becomes pure risk transfer:
Can your balance sheet absorb an unexpected seven-figure engine event?
If the answer is no, the program may be doing exactly what it should.
Pay it.
Sleep at night.
If you can comfortably self-insure the worst case, however, then Jason says it is worth running the actual numbers instead of assuming enrollment is automatically the right answer.
If you’re buying
Never assume “on program” tells you everything you need to know.
Get the actual account status.
Confirm arrears.
Confirm disputed hours.
Understand upcoming escalation.
And if you intend to enroll an aircraft that is currently off program:
Get the buy-in quote before you close.
Not afterward.
That number belongs in the acquisition math.
Six questions to ask your engine-program provider
Jason recommends getting these answers in writing:
- Are reserves segregated by engine type, or pooled across the broader book?
- What is the contractual cap on annual escalation?
- What is the complete transfer-fee schedule, including future step-ups?
- How has the coverage definition changed over the last three renewals?
- Who owns the program entity today—and is that the same owner you originally contracted with?
- How many loaner engines are actually available to support your fleet?
And ask them again every year.
Because the answers can change.
The owner from the beginning
Jason returns to the owner who inspired the episode:
Eleven years enrolled.
More than $1 million contributed.
Aircraft worth approximately $3 million.
Another four to five years before the expected event.
After applying the framework, Jason believes this owner crossed the economic threshold roughly two years ago—assuming he has sufficient liquidity to self-insure the engine exposure.
For that specific owner, the remaining escalating contributions may now exceed the protection and residual premium he is likely to receive.
That does not mean every owner should cancel.
It means every owner should calculate.
Because “on program good, off program bad” was never a financial analysis.
The bottom line:
An engine program is not a moral virtue.
It is not automatically good because the airplane is enrolled or reckless because it is not.
It is a financing decision involving:
A term.
A counterparty.
An escalating payment stream.
A transfer value.
A risk exposure.
And a break-even.
You run that analysis on every other major aircraft expense.
Run it on your engines too.
Get Your Free Special Report on The Engine Program Market here: https://vref.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/VREF-Special-Report-The-Engine-Program-Market-Aug-2026.pdf
For accurate, defensible aircraft valuations trusted by lenders, insurers, attorneys, operators, and aviation professionals worldwide, get started with your VREF Online Membership today.
VREF it before you make the call.
The market doesn’t care what the website says…
It only cares what the record shows.
Fly safe. Stay smart.
