For most companies, reputation is the most important possession, and that is particularly true in private aviation. No one is more aware of that than Dana Carr, co-owner, vice president and director of operations with Florida-based charter provider Air Trek. He has been working to restore his family-owned company’s image for the past six years, ever since the FAA revoked its air operator certificate, a move the NTSB later ruled was erroneous. “I was in shock,” Carr recalled before the audience at the National Air Transportation Association’s annual Air Charter Summit. “Nothing in our 31 years of business at that point could have justified the FAA’s actions.”
The agency was misguided by what Air Trek insisted was a series of trumped-up anonymous whistle-blower allegations and blog posts created by some disgruntled former employees and seemingly taken at face value by FAA investigators. For more than a year Air Trek fought back, before an NTSB administrative law judge finally reversed the FAA’s emergency order of revocation in 2008, in essence telling the agency that its argument was meritless, and accusing it of “shooting first and aiming later.”
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