FAA seeks $351,000 from Fayetteville charter operator Jett Aircraft over 37 unauthorized passenger flights

FAYETTEVILLE — The Federal Aviation Administration wants a Fayetteville charter operator to pay $351,000 over what the agency says were dozens of passenger flights the company was not authorized to fly.

The FAA announced the proposed civil penalty Monday against Creamer Pilot Services, the Drake Field company that does business as Jett Aircraft. The agency alleges the company flew 31 passenger-carrying flights between October 2021 and July 2022 using three aircraft that were not listed on its Operations Specifications, the FAA-issued document that spells out which planes an air carrier may use and what kind of flying it may do.

The FAA also alleges six more passenger flights between April and November 2022 on two aircraft that were on the company’s specifications but flew outside the 48 contiguous states when the company was not authorized to go there.

All 37 violations, the agency said, were committed “knowingly, carelessly, and recklessly.”

The FAA’s two-paragraph announcement does not say what the aircraft were, where the flights went or who was aboard. The company had not responded publicly to the announcement as of Tuesday morning. Fox Business, which reported the penalty overnight, said it reached out to the company and got no reply.

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A proposed penalty is not a final one. The FAA’s announcement does not lay out a deadline, but in its other recent enforcement cases the agency has said operators have 30 days after receiving the notice to respond. Under FAA rules a company can pay, submit evidence and ask for a reduction, request an informal conference with agency lawyers or ask for a formal hearing.

Jett Aircraft calls itself the largest privately owned operator in Northwest Arkansas. Founder Lance Creamer has worked in aviation since 1987 and started the company in 2011, leasing his own planes to customers before obtaining an FAA Part 135 air carrier certificate in 2018 that allowed it to carry paying passengers on charter flights, according to the company’s website and a 2021 profile in Talk Business & Politics. The company is named for Creamer’s grandson, Jett Allen.

Its planes fly under the call sign “Darkhorse” instead of their tail numbers, a privacy arrangement the company’s attorney, Asa Hutchinson III, told Talk Business in November 2021 keeps flight trackers from following its customers. At the time, Hutchinson said the company owned two Learjets, a Cessna Citation Encore and a Daher TBM 700, employed 16 people including six pilots, expected more than $8 million in revenue for the year and was working to get FAA authorization to fly to Canada, the Caribbean and South America.

That is the same window in which the FAA now says the company was flying passengers outside the lower 48 without permission.

FAA registry records now list at least six jets registered to Creamer Pilot Services at the company’s South School Avenue address: five Learjet 45s and a Cessna Citation X. Four of them, three Learjets and the Citation, are listed for sale on the company’s website. The website says the company flies nonstop “to any destination within the Contiguous United States” and has pages marketing flights to Van Nuys, California, Dallas, Nashville, Miami, Arizona and Nevada.

The company’s jets have stayed busy. Flight data from ADS-B Exchange, a tracking site that ignores the FAA program letting aircraft owners hide their flights from most public trackers, shows four Creamer-registered jets made 101 flights between Sept. 20 and Oct. 19 and used 54 airports besides Drake Field. Dallas, Orlando and Little Rock were the most frequent stops. One Learjet flew from Fayetteville to Bar Harbor, Maine, and back in a single day on Oct. 10. The Learjet that ran off the runway in Batesville and one of the jets listed for sale did not fly during the period.

One of those trips left the lower 48. On Sept. 28 the Learjet N46MW flew from New Orleans to Brownsville, Texas, then south across Mexico and Central America to the airport at Liberia, Costa Rica, the gateway to the Guanacaste beach resorts, where it spent about an hour and a half on the ground before flying back over Cuba to Sarasota, Florida. The tracking data does not show whether the flight carried paying passengers, and it does not show whether the company now holds the FAA authority for international charters it was still seeking in 2021.

The flying did not stop with Monday’s announcement. A Creamer Learjet landed at Drake Field from Peachtree City, Georgia, at 2:26 p.m. that afternoon.

Fort Smith businessman Luis Andrade announced in November 2020 that he had bought the company’s assets and seven aircraft and would be its president and co-owner. Hutchinson told Talk Business a year later that the deal fell through and Creamer remained the sole owner.

The company has one accident on its record with the National Transportation Safety Board. On the night of Nov. 29, 2022, a Jett Aircraft Learjet 45 carrying two pilots and six passengers from Waterloo, Iowa, ran off the end of the wet runway at Batesville Regional Airport at more than 100 knots, went through a ditch and the airport fence and suffered substantial damage to its nose. The pilots had minor injuries. The passengers were not hurt.

The NTSB’s final report, published in April 2024, found the captain crossed the runway threshold more than 50 knots faster than the proper approach speed with the flaps at the wrong setting, touched down near the midpoint of the 6,000-foot runway and never used the thrust reversers. The copilot had told him the approach was high and fast. The board blamed the crew’s failure to go around. That flight was operated under general aviation rules rather than as a charter, according to the report, and the FAA’s announcement does not mention it.

Creamer Pilot Services is also in the middle of a federal lawsuit in Fayetteville against its insurer, QBE Insurance Corp., over a claim on a damaged Learjet. The company sued in September 2024 for breach of contract and bad faith. On Sept. 30, U.S. District Judge David Clay Fowlkes threw out the bad-faith claim but sent the contract claim toward trial, finding genuine disputes over whether the jet should have been shipped to Bombardier for repair, whether a Bombardier repair proposal counted as an estimate and QBE’s position that the plane’s salvage value was $1.1 million. The order does not identify the aircraft or say how it was damaged. A final scheduling order was entered Oct. 7.

The Creamer penalty is the second the FAA has proposed against an Arkansas jet operator in the past two years. In March 2025 the agency sought $72,324 from MK Rockwell Investments of Paragould, alleging it flew a Cessna Citation on three air carrier flights with pilots who had not completed required training and checks, and without any Operations Specifications at all.