“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Whether Mark Twain or Dudley Warner said it remains debatable, but the point is that the same thing could be said about gray-market charters. I have been in corporate and VIP aviation for decades, and I have been hearing the legal charter operators complain about this issue for my entire career.
Gray-market charter refers to the practice of an aircraft owner or operator taking money for flying people when that owner and/or operator has no legal right to do so. These scam artists can use pilots who may not be licensed properly and airplanes that may not be maintained to meet the minimum safety regulations. Other well intentioned but poorly informed people make the mistake of letting their airplane go out on an illegal charter not knowing that they might well be in breach of their lending and insurance covenants. Even companies that are lax in their controls over who, or which division, has access to the corporate airplane and their charge-back system could be gray-market charterers and not even know it.
