The Federal Aviation Administration wants ExcelAire, LLC to pay $260,868 after alleging the Long Island charter operator flew two paying flights in August 2025 without a valid air carrier certificate. The agency’s Sept. 22, 2026 announcement says the company had surrendered that certificate two months earlier, in June 2025, after its director of operations and other required management staff resigned.
ExcelAire, based at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Ronkonkoma, New York, operates jet and helicopter charters, aircraft management, and maintenance work out of roughly 200,000 square feet of hangar space. Founded in 1993, the company has changed hands twice since 2012, most recently when Executive Fliteways bought it in 2023.
A certificate surrendered, then flights that continued anyway
Under FAA rules, a Part 135 charter certificate holder must keep specific people in place — a director of operations, a chief pilot, and a director of maintenance — for the certificate to remain valid. The FAA’s own Part 135 general requirements page spells out that an operator must designate these roles by name before it can even obtain a standard certificate, and losing them creates a hole a charter company cannot legally fly through.
ExcelAire lost those personnel in June 2025 and surrendered its certificate as a result, according to the FAA’s timeline. Two months later, in August 2025, the agency alleges the company nonetheless operated two charter flights for compensation, carrying passengers on trips it was no longer certificated to sell. Neither flight’s route, aircraft type, or passenger count appears in the FAA’s public announcement, which focuses on the certification gap rather than the specifics of either trip.
“Disregard for the safety of the flying public”
“The conduct of ExcelAire demonstrates a disregard for the safety of the flying public, and its actions were careless or reckless so as to endanger the lives and property of others,” the FAA said in its enforcement announcement. The agency went further on the specific gap that triggered the case: “ExcelAire lacks the required qualified management personnel to ensure the safety of its operations,” it wrote, tying the penalty directly to the missing director-level roles rather than to any single flight’s execution.
Those two lines matter because FAA enforcement against charter operators usually targets either a maintenance lapse or a pilot qualification issue — a single point of failure. Here, the agency’s complaint is structural: the company’s certification itself had already lapsed, meaning every flight after June 2025 carried the same underlying defect regardless of which aircraft or crew flew it.
A $260,868 number now in ExcelAire’s hands to contest
The FAA proposed the penalty on Sept. 22, 2026, and ExcelAire has 30 days from receiving the notice to respond, a standard window in civil penalty cases that gives the company a chance to negotiate, contest, or settle before the fine becomes final. Civil penalty proceedings of this kind can end in a reduced settlement, a full payment, or continued litigation, and the FAA’s announcement does not indicate which path the case is likely to take.
An Aero-News Network write-up of the case framed the underlying issue in blunt terms: authority to carry passengers for hire depends on more than an aircraft and a willing customer. That framing captures what separates this case from an ordinary maintenance violation — ExcelAire had the planes and, presumably, customers willing to pay, but not the underlying legal authority the FAA requires before either of those things can turn into a charter flight.
A company with a fleet built for exactly this kind of flying
ExcelAire’s fleet as of 2022 included two Embraer Legacy 600 jets, a Bombardier Challenger 604, a Cessna Citation Latitude, a Gulfstream G280, a Gulfstream G-V, and a Pilatus PC-12NG — the kind of mid-size and large business jets that private charter customers pay a premium to book on short notice. The company is not new to FAA scrutiny; a 2006 mid-air collision between an ExcelAire Legacy 600 and a Gol Transportes Aéreos Boeing 737 over Brazil killed all 154 people aboard the airliner, an investigation that found the ExcelAire crew had switched off their aircraft’s collision-avoidance system before the crash. A 2022 ground incident at MacArthur Airport, in which a Pilatus PC-12 the company operated collided with a parked jet, drew a separate FAA investigation, though that inquiry produced no penalty of the size now proposed over the 2025 charter flights.
Charter certification exists so a passenger booking a flight never has to check whether the company selling the seat still holds the underlying federal authority to sell it. The FAA’s civil penalty process does not require proof that a flight itself was flown unsafely — the agency’s theory in the ExcelAire case rests entirely on the absence of valid certification and qualified management, a paperwork-and-personnel failure the agency treats as a safety violation in its own right regardless of how any individual flight went.
Whether the current $260,868 penalty survives the 30-day response period at full value remains open. What the FAA’s own paperwork already establishes is narrower and harder to dispute: a charter operator flew paying passengers on two flights after the specific federal authorization required to sell those seats had already been surrendered.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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