Inside a Private Jet Club Where Everything Went Wrong

AeroVanti vowed to shake up private aviation with way-below-market rates, but it kept canceling the flights. Customers, employees and contractors say the CEO ripped them off—to the tune of $40 million.

By the time he came to work for AeroVanti, a private jet startup in Sarasota, Florida, Daniel Marchick had worked in aviation for 20 years. In the US Air Force, he flew AC-130 gunships and UH-1N Hueys, then moved to a desk job, helping to coordinate plane takeoffs and landings. Aviation enterprises require a complex symphony of skilled actors—not just pilots but mechanics, fuel suppliers, air traffic controllers, schedulers. If one node fails, the whole system can implode. There’s little room for innocent error, even less for outright deception, reported Brent Crane at Bloomberg.com.

Marchick was hired to run AeroVanti’s scheduling for $100,000 a year. It was his first job in the civilian sector. He was excited. AeroVanti looked like an all-American disruptor, out to shake up the staid, cloistered world of private flying. “Private aviation does not have to be this expensive,” founder Patrick Britton-Harr told an interviewer soon after launching the business in 2021. “The way that we set up our model is to have power in numbers. The more members we have under our program, the more cost-efficient it will be.”

Members had to pay only $1,000 per month plus $1,500 per flight-hour, a steal compared with the industry average of nearly $7,000 per hour for comparable twin-engine turboprops. Britton-Harr framed this pay-as-you-go approach as “management light.” Flights on his five leased-to-buy, twin-engine Piaggio P.180 Avantis would come with catering and Wi-Fi and allow for pets. There would be 24/7 customer service. After signing up 300 members, he said, the company would acquire more planes. From then on, new members would need referrals.

Private aviation was booming. In 2021, Wheels Up, a company backed by Delta Air Lines that runs on a similar membership model, had raised more than $650 million in the private aviation industry’s first-ever initial public offering. Britton-Harr, a self-described serial entrepreneur, said a revolution was coming and he wanted to be a part of it.

Britton-Harr founded AeroVanti in his late 30s. Wide-shouldered and big-jawed with short-cropped hair and a beaming smile, he communicated with the quick, confident diction of a QVC host. Fluent in boardroom jargon, he could sound like an artificial intelligence program trained on corporate PowerPoints. He preferred fist-bumps to handshakes. Most often he came to work wearing shorts, flip-flops, a visor, dark aviators and a Rolex.

AeroVanti divided its operations between Sarasota and Annapolis, Maryland. Britton-Harr, a licensed pilot, had grown up in Florida and Maryland with four brothers. The company’s accounting division was in Annapolis. Flight operations were handled at Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, in a rented office building on the tarmac. There, a propeller-shaped clock hung on the wall alongside photos of soaring Avantis, the plush, speedy Italian aircraft that gave AeroVanti its name. A custom drawing hung on the wall of Britton-Harr and Chief Operating Officer Robert De Pol, a former Navy pilot, clutching beers beside Britton-Harr’s two chocolate labs.

In marketing the company, Britton-Harr often invoked his family. One reason he decided to use Piaggio planes, he told a reporter, was that his wife liked them. (Like many private jets, they fly at 41,000 feet, comfortably above weather systems.) His mother enjoyed the fully enclosed rear lavatory. His father, Steve Harr, was on board as chief pilot. While Britton-Harr was growing up, the family had moved around a lot to follow Steve’s job. He flew for the US Navy before going to work for American Airlines. Now, he’d be flying the family business.

At first, Marchick was impressed. The administrators and mechanics in Sarasota were competent and gung-ho. Steve Harr had decades of flight experience. AeroVanti had announced investments totaling about $110 million. And the business was growing rapidly. In its first year, it signed up more than 300 members and recorded $20 million in revenue, according to Britton-Harr. Twenty members had paid a lump sum of $150,000 for a special “Top Gun” tier, entitling them to priority booking and other perks.

The cracks, however, soon began to show. Customers started experiencing frequent last-minute cancellations, which the company often blamed on vague mechanical issues or “supply chain” problems. Several customers found themselves stranded in far-flung destinations, forced to make abrupt arrangements to get home. Others missed weddings and graduations. “This is not what I had in mind when I signed up for this,” one client wrote on an email chain of about 100 people who’d experienced similar treatment. “Constant scramble versus relaxed luxury.”

“Bernie Madoff could learn a few things from these clowns,” wrote another.

“Imagine the worst person you can have to be in charge of anybody’s lives or money and not having anybody to stand in their way,” Marchick says. “That’s what happened.”

AeroVanti has since gone into a tailspin. The company faces multiple lawsuits from members and aircraft leasers. In interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek, a dozen employees and more than two dozen people associated with the company describe a litany of abusive behavior and malfeasance. (Most of the employees spoke on condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements and are afraid of retaliation.) The Federal Aviation Administration is actively investigating the company, and the US Department of Justice is targeting some of its assets in a complaint related to Britton-Harr’s previous business. Opposing counsel have alleged in court filings that he absconded with $40 million of members’ money.

AeroVanti hasn’t responded to the lawsuits against it. Neither Britton-Harr nor his relatives responded to inquiries for this story.

Compared with the highly regulated realm of commercial airlines, private aviation has long been a kind of Wild West. On paper, operators must follow stringent regulations. But in practice, there is scant oversight. “This industry attracts some scummy people,” says Craig Picken, a veteran aviation recruiter. “Ninety-nine percent of operators are really good, but there’s always that 1 or 2% who screw it up for everybody.” There have been cases of fraud and gross mismanagement before, especially during the pandemic boom, when new customers overwhelmed the industry. But to insiders, the AeroVanti fiasco has been on another level.

“The brazenness of it to me is just unbelievable,” says David Guzman, who owns a Piaggio charter company in Tulsa that leased planes to AeroVanti. (He isn’t involved in the lawsuits.) “Patrick’s an intelligent guy. It’s not willful ignorance. I believe it’s purposeful. I believe they knew what they were doing.”

Ever since the Wright Brothers soared over Kitty Hawk, the American aviation community has longed to put an airplane in every garage. In the interwar period, the US Department of Commerce launched a campaign to encourage the design of a $700 “airplane for everyman.” The automobile, once technically infeasible or prohibitively expensive, had become ubiquitous. Why not flying, too?

Of course, airplanes are more complicated than cars. And the world owes mass air travel not to private flyers but large commercial airliners. Yet the dream of solo flight, of Americans taking off at a moment’s notice into the skies with their loved ones and nobody else, persisted. The invention of the jet engine in the ’50s enabled small aircraft to travel much farther without refueling, and truly fast small jets began to appear in the ’60s. There was the eight-seater Learjet 23 produced in 1963, which could reach 500 mph. Then the big-cabined Gulfstream II, released in 1966, brought high comfort to the skies. In 1980, Paris-Le Bourget Airport became the first-ever facility dedicated solely to private jets. Hundreds more followed.

Early on, most private aviation operations were charter-based. Customers paid for flights à la carte. In the late ’80s, NetJets Inc. started a “fractional ownership program,” wherein customers purchased shares of a plane in the same way one would buy shares in a company. Each part-owner was allotted a certain number of flight-hours per year. Today, the $25 billion industry remains divided largely among three models: fractional jet ownership, private jet ownership and membership clubs.

AeroVanti billed itself in the latter category. It operated under Part 91F, a federal regulation that allows cost-sharing. It built its image around luxury and promised in its member agreement that customers could also expect to forge “business development relationships” with their elite peers.

Business development was Britton-Harr’s forte. Before AeroVanti, he’d founded several ventures in health care, despite having no formal training: a mobile dentistry company called ProHealth Dental Inc. and several medical testing lab companies that catered to retirement homes. To a person, everyone who spoke with Businessweek praised his uncanny mastery of the art of the sale.

“He’s very personable, very enthusiastic, passionate,” says Guzman, the Tulsa charter lessor. “To the layperson, he could come up with just enough subject matter knowledge to appear as an expert.”

“He could sell ice to Eskimos,” says John Galdieri, an aviation consultant who gave advice to Britton-Harr early on.

And at first, some members were happy with the service. “The plane was fantastic,” recalls Mark Israel, a Top Gun member who signed up after seeing that AeroVanti was an official sponsor of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “It was big and comfortable.”

But it soon became clear there weren’t enough planes to go around. Although Britton-Harr and his sales team assured members they had a dozen in operation, in reality only two or three were airworthy at any one time, according to one of the lawsuits, and AeroVanti started routinely canceling reservations. Employees and members say it assured disgruntled customers it would reimburse them for market-rate rebookings through another charter company, which could cost tens of thousands of dollars per leg. Often, though, it didn’t.

Employees say Britton-Harr’s sales pitches, which often included free test flights, were part of the problem. “Patrick would add flights in and destroy the schedule,” Marchick says. “If employees pushed back, he would be like, ‘I’m the CEO. This is my company. This can be done. There are no real rules.’ ” Despite the overload, AeroVanti’s sales team was ordered to add $5 million in revenue every two weeks.

Under these conditions, safety sometimes took a backseat. Someone had written “Minimum ten hours of rest” on an office whiteboard, in reference to federal guidelines that dictate how long pilots can fly per day. Marchick says that one day, Britton-Harr pointed at the board. “Erase that number,” he said. “That doesn’t exist.”

He insisted that his two dozen pilots fly more frequently to accommodate the surprise extra flights he added to the schedule. When employees balked, he’d say, “This is an at-will state!”—implying that anyone who complained could be easily fired, according to Marchick. At one point, Britton-Harr fired his father, who had protested his management style. “NO ONE IS TO CONTACT Steve Harr anymore for any reason,” pilots were warned in a company email last May. De Pol, whom many employees regarded as the company’s one responsible executive, also left without warning. (De Pol declined to comment beyond saying he wants to distance himself from AeroVanti.) Now Britton-Harr had total control of the company, according to Marchick and other employees. He began flying by helicopter to the Sarasota office from his home on Tampa’s glitzy Davis Islands.

During this time, Britton-Harr continued to court new sources of cash for AeroVanti, and the planes were a useful prop, Marchick says. Prospective investors often received free flights, even at the expense of paying members. He and other employees say many of these flights were kept off official logs, a violation of FAA regulations. Britton-Harr referred to these free flyers with the abbreviation “D.N.S.,” meaning “do not screw.” “He had his pecking order of people,” Marchick says.

One regular D.N.S. was businessman Alexander Nistratov, who fled Russia some years ago after being indicted for real estate fraud while working for that government’s property management agency. Businessweek viewed a screenshot of his page in AeroVanti’s scheduling system that notes, “Per PBH, flights for Mr. Nistratov are gratis.” Nistratov declined to comment on AeroVanti beyond confirming that he had chartered flights.

Britton-Harr was a big spender known to throw lavish, boozy parties. Some took place in AeroVanti’s Sarasota hangar. At a member recruiting event on a yacht in Fort Lauderdale, he provided $50,000 worth of caviar, according to Scott Hopes, who briefly succeeded him as CEO.

But AeroVanti had no company credit card or shared account; Britton-Harr controlled all of its finances. Assuming they’d be compensated, employees often paid for company expenses using personal funds. Even Philip Welborn, the senior finance manager for Air Club, AeroVanti’s membership program, griped to co-workers that he spent $58,000 of his own money and wasn’t reimbursed. Welborn didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At one point, Britton-Harr stopped paying AeroVanti’s bills. The office became inundated with calls from fuel companies, mechanics, parts suppliers and the people whose planes they’d leased. One of these callers was a Florida entrepreneur named Scott Levine, who’d leased AeroVanti his LearJet in 2021. The three-year contract was supposed to net him $1 million in profit, plus four free years of AeroVanti membership, but after two payments, AeroVanti defaulted.

Britton-Harr didn’t respond to requests for an explanation, Levine says, so he started texting other employees whose numbers he had, asking for help. The next day, AeroVanti canceled his membership and said it wouldn’t make any more payments because his plane was “not airworthy,” which Levine said wasn’t true. When he went to repossess it, there was a mechanic’s lien on the plane citing unpaid bills, and Levine had to sue to get it back. When he eventually did, four months after first leasing it, several parts were missing: tires, a landing beacon, a hose under a wing cover. Fellow lessors told him they’d been installed on other AeroVanti planes.

After Levine unloaded on AeroVanti and its CEO in a LinkedIn post, Britton-Harr’s attorney threatened to sue him for libel. Instead, Levine sued Britton-Harr for unpaid bills. He received a default judgment of $2 million, though Britton-Harr never responded. Levine says that hubris tracks. “When you’re pretending to have all that money but you’re spending other people’s money, it just kind of inflates you,” he says. Several other owners have repossessed planes from AeroVanti.

But all of that was still behind the scenes. Outwardly, at least, AeroVanti’s second year looked like a story of expansion. In July 2021 it announced it had raised about $10 million in venture capital from Network 1 Financial Securities. (US Securities and Exchange Commission filings indicate that Network 1, which didn’t respond to requests for comment, paid only about one-third of it.) Originally, Britton-Harr’s business model for AeroVanti relied on outsourcing some flights and services to other operators. Now he was focused on what he called “vertical integration,” doing everything in-house, from flying to maintenance.

In March 2022, AeroVanti purchased a small Arizona aviation company called Marjet. It said in a press release that it did so to acquire Marjet’s FAA Part 135 certification, something Guzman and other aviation experts say AeroVanti should have had all along. (Part 135, earned through rigorous inspections of a company’s safety practices, is required for an airline to perform charter flights on demand.) AeroVanti said the deal upgraded its operations and would allow the company “to rapidly scale.” Around this time, its fleet grew to include an Embraer Phenom 100, at least nine Piaggios, three Learjet 31As, a Gulfstream GIII and a helicopter. The company hired in-house mechanics. After De Pol resigned, Britton-Harr brought in former Piaggio America CEO Paolo Ferreri as interim COO. It was a time of “incredible momentum and record growth of more than 400% year-over-year,” the company said in a press release. AeroVanti’s client list soon included athletic departments at the University of Maryland and the University of Central Florida.

Meanwhile, Britton-Harr was spending jet-loads on marketing. He signed multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals with the Chicago Cubs, USA Sailing, the Florida Panthers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. (The “AeroVanti Lounge” at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa promised “luxury at every step.”) For the Coca-Cola 600, the company sponsored a Nascar driver named Corey LaJoie. For the 2023 Preakness Stakes, it sponsored 10 suites. It co-hosted events with the Blue Angels Foundation, raising money for veterans. One Christmas, it flew a low-income Navy family from Florida to Maryland to see relatives and posted a video of the reunion to YouTube.

The company even started an offshoot yacht club that required a $100,000 deposit. The AeroVanti Yacht Club was run by Britton-Harr’s younger half-brother, Liam Harr, a College of Charleston sailing ace with elite connections. (He’d once raced to Bermuda on a sailboat financed by Amway Corp. scion Doug DeVos.) Its website notes that one of its vessels, the 108-foot Casino Royale, had been used in the James Bond film “as the floating lair of the villain.”

At the same time, AeroVanti struggled to pay employees. In late 2022, every employee interviewed for this story says, paychecks started appearing late, then not at all. One day, office workers heard they’d be paid by wire transfer instead of their usual payroll vendor, ADP. There had been “issues” with ADP, they were told. In fact, the vendor had dropped AeroVanti because of unpaid bills, according to a former members services staffer. ADP declined to comment beyond confirming that AeroVanti is no longer a client.

Pilots were getting skimped, too. They were upset with a sudden switch from an hourly rate to a flat salary of $12,000 a month. Then the payments started arriving late. One pilot says they were more than a month behind at one point. On a single day in June, four pilots quit, and a dozen or so more left soon after, leaving AeroVanti with maybe six. “They could see the writing on the wall,” says the pilot, who stayed through that period. “They said, ‘We’re done.’ ”

Then a pilot who was ferrying New Orleans Saints kicker Wil Lutz accidentally drove a plane off a runway in Destin, Florida. Other pilots had warned Britton-Harr that this pilot wasn’t qualified to operate a Piaggio’s notoriously finicky controls. But with so many pilots gone, and desperate to please a VIP like Lutz, Britton-Harr had pressured the pilot to fly. “It could have been much worse,” says an AeroVanti flight scheduler. “They pleaded with Patrick not to let this guy fly, and Patrick didn’t care.”

In an interview with Businessweek, the pilot who crashed blamed mechanical issues, though he acknowledged that AeroVanti didn’t find evidence of any. He says Britton-Harr pushed him to keep flying Piaggios after the accident but he refused, worried they were unsafe.

In June 2023, Joey Giordano, the vice president for operations, emailed employees to say that compensation was stopping completely. AeroVanti was not closing but merely “awaiting some capital in order to get back on track and continue on a path of success,” he wrote. “There are no hard feelings if you decide that AeroVanti isn’t the right path for you. For those that stay, there could be very green valley’s [sic] ahead to enjoy!” Giordano didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Beyond being ticked off and anxious about paying their own bills, employees were confused. How could a company with such a massive marketing budget fail to make payroll? It wasn’t as if AeroVanti had been crying poverty all along. It had been less than a year since the company announced raising a fresh $100 million in capital led by Lafayette Aircraft Leasing LLC.

The announcement turned out to be hot air. Lafayette says it never raised any money for AeroVanti. It had only leased AeroVanti a Phenom 100 jet, which it repossessed soon after because AeroVanti didn’t pay its bills.

Late last spring, like a bout of bad turbulence, the lawsuits arrived. The first two each consisted of 20 members who paid $150,000 apiece for Top Gun memberships. In the Top Gun arrangement, the money invested was supposed to go into an escrow account to purchase a jet in the fractional ownership vein. The suits claim this money never went into escrow and the planes were repossessed.

“It was a mess,” says Kristin Vogel, a Top Gun member who’s not involved in the litigation. “We’d get confirmations all week, then wake up that morning and get a cancellation.” On her third canceled flight, Vogel called Britton-Harr directly. She told him she felt she was being scammed. “He screamed at me, ‘If you say the word scam one more time, I’m going to remove you as a member!’ ” she recalls. The outburst freaked her out. She says she thought, “If this company is not doing well and they’re cutting corners and we’re getting on a plane that they own—it just didn’t feel safe.”

Shortly after the Top Gun lawsuits were filed, Britton-Harr issued a public statement decrying the plaintiffs as opportunists. “They believe in cancel culture,” he said. “We have a tremendous amount of support. We are continuing to move forward and will not be blindsided by a few toxic individuals.” At least 10 cases have now been filed against Britton-Harr, some of them arguing that the real cancel culture was his scheduling shell game.

In June, as the suits began to pile up, AeroVanti announced that Britton-Harr was stepping down as CEO, though he would remain chairman. Replacing him was Hopes, an entrepreneur, amateur pilot and former Manatee County, Florida, administrator with a controversial past.

As the outside world encroached upon AeroVanti, the company had already begun to crumble from within. Former employees say they could be fired if they told angry members the truth about their cancellations. But by this time, FAA investigators had spent close to a year interviewing AeroVanti associates. After landing at airports, pilots found themselves subjected to frequent “ramp checks”—stops for inspection—even as far afield as the Bahamas. Ramp checks are a sign, according to pilots, that authorities have received complaints about a company. The FAA declined to comment.

All of this pressure further inflamed Britton-Harr’s paranoia. One day last spring, he demanded that employees stop using Slack to communicate. He was concerned that “the feds” might be trying to infiltrate the messaging platform, Marchick recalls. The feds were, in fact, interested in Britton-Harr. In July the Justice Department filed a complaint against him for his conduct at a previous lab testing venture. The DOJ alleged that he’d defrauded Medicare out of $7 million by submitting false claims for pandemic-era tests that never occurred. Some of these were billed to Medicare for diseases that are only found in animals. At least two AeroVanti airplanes and a sailboat had been purchased with these ill-gotten funds, the DOJ claimed. A default judgment later found Britton-Harr liable for $30 million in damages.

For many members and employees, news of the federal complaint made them wonder what else might be lurking in Britton-Harr’s past. Online searches revealed a long history of negligence. In a 2006 drunk driving accident in Maryland, he’d killed his passenger, a 20-year-old Naval Academy midshipman; weeks before the tragedy, he was ticketed for driving 120 mph on the Baltimore Beltway in his BMW. “I was unaware how my actions affect other people,” he told a judge. He was sentenced to five years in prison for vehicular manslaughter but had all but nine months suspended in favor of probation and community service.

After the DOJ complaint, Britton-Harr stopped appearing at the AeroVanti office. Employees learned he’d been evicted from two Sarasota luxury properties for unpaid rent. His brother Troy Britton-Harr, who often handled miscellaneous tasks for him, had collected Patrick’s belongings. The founder appeared to have flown the coop.

In October, neither Britton-Harr nor his four brothers were responding to inquiries, but Hopes was keen to talk. The new CEO envisioned a tremendous resuscitation. That month, he’d brought in Piaggio mechanics from Italy to get four planes airworthy, he says. Most of his time, though, was spent dealing with lawsuits and other problems that had piled up during “the Patrick era.”

Hopes, a retired doctor, wore a striped collared shirt with a Presidents Cup logo on the chest. Tiny palms lined his shorts. Bespectacled, with salt-and-pepper hair and a smartwatch, he exuded the easy, well-practiced charm of a Southern man of means. In the ’90s he’d run a medical firm, HMD Healthcare—this was why he’d acquired a pilot’s license, he says, to fly between various business matters in Florida.

Hopes first met Britton-Harr in late 2022, he says, at an event hosted by the Sarasota newspaper Business Observer. Britton-Harr had made the paper’s annual 40 Under 40 list (the Observer: “Who would play you in the movie of your life?” Britton-Harr: “Ryan Gosling”) and it threw a gala with the recipients. Hopes, then the county administrator, had come to the event with another honoree, Courtney De Pol, his deputy. She had recently relocated to Sarasota for her husband Robert’s new job as COO of AeroVanti. She’d listed Hopes as a mentor, he said.

When Hopes took over, many AeroVanti members and employees harbored misgivings. For starters, they wondered why he would have agreed to run such a troubled company. And there was his resignation from his government job, where he’d been accused by the Florida Center for Government Accountability of violating public records laws and the county sheriff’s office recommended criminal charges. (In his defense, Hopes notes that no charges were ever filed.) Some wondered if he and Britton-Harr were in cahoots. Was their plan to plunder the dying company, declare bankruptcy and split the remaining assets?

Three months after putting Hopes in charge, Britton-Harr fired him and replaced him with his older brother, Todd Britton-Harr. Hopes said he believes he was forced out of AeroVanti because Britton-Harr wanted personal access to new investment capital AeroVanti seemed about to receive. He laughed at the suggestion that he was in on any of it. “Had I known more about Patrick,” he said, “I probably would not have taken this up.”

Todd had his own problems. In 2013 he’d been convicted of smuggling over a thousand pounds of marijuana from Mexico into Texas. In court he claimed he’d been a confidential informant for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, which the agency denied. Around the same time, Todd had been convicted of real estate fraud in Florida. He served several years in prison. Now he was running a construction business in Tampa called Britton-Harr Contracting. “These people are just creating cash flow to support their lifestyles,” Hopes said at a cafe beside Sarasota International. “What they’re doing has nothing to do with building a successful company.”

Where did all that cash go? Some may have gone toward property for Britton-Harr, who maintains at least six bank accounts and a dizzying array of holding companies, according to the DOJ complaint. In September 2021 he purchased a $554,000 home in Annapolis. A year later, he bought two vacant lots in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for $60,000 each. Contractor Andy Amrhein of Thomasville Restoration recently sued Britton-Harr for unpaid work on his Annapolis house. Britton-Harr hasn’t responded. Reached for comment, Amrhein asked, “Do you know where I can find him?”

Much of the money likely went into AeroVanti, employees say. A single bill for airplane maintenance can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Leasing them isn’t cheap, either. Neither is fuel. Or payroll. Or athletic sponsorships. Of course, Britton-Harr was stiffing people on many of these bills. “He paid the bare minimum to keep things moving,” Marchick says. But the ones he was paying still added up.

Believe it or not, Britton-Harr is back. Three days into the Todd era, the older brother stepped down after learning of a $750,000 default judgment against AeroVanti in one of the lawsuits, he told the Observer. There was also a $25 million infusion from a Las Vegas investor that had been rescinded at the last minute. So Britton-Harr returned to the corporate cockpit.

This Halloween, the prodigal CEO emailed flabbergasted members about AeroVanti’s “revitalization.” Given the circumstances, his tone was remarkably business-as-usual. Monthly dues had increased to $2,500, he wrote. But Air Club members now had access to two yachts (the Casino Royale and the En Garde, for daily rates of $4,995 and $3,995, respectively), a fishing boat (the Permit, $2,995 a day) and a 50-foot sailboat (Sweet Caroline, $6,995). A mobile app was in the works, he wrote, and the club was already “back up and flying.” He cited a single airplane, a Learjet 31A, which Hopes says Britton-Harr doesn’t own and Marchick calls a “freaking mess.”

Those hoping for a reckoning with AeroVanti’s turmoil were left wanting. In his email, Britton-Harr acknowledged only that the company’s “massive support and growth” had “outpaced the operational capacities and overall needs of our members.” It was one of just three statements that gestured ever so vaguely toward the past. The rest was focused on AeroVanti’s “reset,” its “renewed shot at success” and the smooth, glorious takeoff that was surely on its way.