The fear is palpable at corporate flight departments that have put their aircraft on someone else’s Part 135 OpSpecs. Those who do by-the-book dry leases can sleep peacefully at night. The ones with the oh-so-clever wet leases in disguise will have more trouble. The burning question that keeps them up is, “Are we legal?” These corporate flight departments have paid exorbitant legal fees to top names in aviation to write convoluted gobbledygook documents; they’ve gotten “agency” agreements for their pilots, their mechanics, their management companies, their brokers, themselves. But do all these pages of dense legalese make them legal? Are they bulletproof if the feds come after them? And who will these feds be? The FAA, the IRS or the big guns from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, packing scary criminal sanctions like jail terms? The real nightmare scenario is all of them at one time.

These issues should keep corporate flight operators up at night. Since aviation began–or at least since I’ve been involved in aviation (which sometimes feels like one and the same thing)–wet leasing your aircraft and carrying passengers for compensation or hire has required a Part 135 certificate. That hasn’t changed. Yes, the FAA gave incoherent signals under pressure from some of the alphabet groups to allow corporate pilots to fly their employer’s aircraft when it was on a Part 135’s OpSpecs. To the extent I understand the legal underpinnings of this FAA theory, somehow if the corporate pilot became an agent of the Part 135– while remaining an employee of the corporation whose aircraft he was flying–an illegal wet lease would be transformed to a legal arrangement. Well, guess what? When the FAA directed its fine enforcement light onto these arrangements in the case of TAG/AMI, the agreements didn’t pass muster and the arrangements fell apart like a house of cards. So much for trusting a wink and a nod from the government.