Well before the conclusion of its extensive investigation of AMI Jet Charter and emergency revocation of AMI’s charter certificate last year, the FAA investigated Chesterfield, Mo. charter operator American Air Network (AAN) and revoked its charter certificate without allowing the company to respond to the agency’s allegations. The two sides of the AAN story present sharply contrasting portraits of a company that, says the FAA, was renting out its operating certificate and a company, says a former AAN manager, that worked hard to operate within FAA regulations. What makes the story particularly intriguing is the final outcome: the FAA shut down both AAN and AMI, but the financial penalties differed vastly. AAN (whose safety record included fatal accidents) was hit for $56,000, but the agency clobbered accident-free TAG/AMI for a record $10 million.
Throughout 2006, the FAA held a series of meetings to explain the concept of operational control to the charter industry and to help educate its own inspectors, who seemed to be unclear about the concept. At many of those seminars, the FAA officials running the meetings used AAN as an example of how not to run a charter operation. A former AAN manager who attended one of the operational control seminars told AIN, “I was absolutely disgusted at the misrepresentation of the facts at that workshop. I was disgusted with their giddiness, their glee, at how they represented what they did and how they used it as part of their workshop.”
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