The FAA's public Part 135 operators and aircraft list — a free verification tool launched in early 2020 and hosted on the agency's Safe Air Charter website — was temporarily deactivated in February 2026 after a series of data integrity failures that eroded its reliability as a compliance and consumer protection resource. The agency had skipped scheduled updates across two extended periods: July through September 2025, and again from September 2025 through February 2026. Investigative reporting by *Private Jet Card Comparisons* through multiple February 2026 articles exposed specific anomalies in the data, including defunct operators still appearing as active certificate holders, delisted aircraft still assigned to operators, and a particularly striking error in which thousands of aircraft were erroneously attributed to a small Louisiana seaplane operator. On February 24, 2026, an FAA spokesperson confirmed the decision to deactivate the spreadsheet pending resolution of the data quality problems, and a notice was posted directly on the FAA site. The list was subsequently restored on approximately May 3, 2026, and is now reported to be updated on a weekly basis.
For charter operators, brokers, and passengers relying on the list as a legal verification mechanism, the multi-month gap and subsequent data errors created meaningful operational and compliance exposure. The National Air Transportation Association stepped in on March 3, 2026, advising its members — and recommending to charter buyers and brokers — that verification should be conducted through local Flight Standards District Offices during the outage period. The FSDO recommendation is procedurally sound but operationally slower than a searchable public spreadsheet, representing a real friction point for time-sensitive charter transactions. Operators conducting legitimate Part 135 flights during the outage period faced the risk of being unable to demonstrate their certificated status through the publicly accessible tool that many in the industry had come to rely upon as a first-pass verification step. The restoration of the list with a caveat — that operators absent from the restored spreadsheet should still be cross-checked with the FSDO — signals that the FAA has not yet confirmed complete data fidelity even after reactivation.
The episode surfaces a broader regulatory vulnerability in the on-demand charter ecosystem: the enforcement architecture against illegal charter depends significantly on the accuracy and accessibility of the Part 135 certification database. Operators and aircraft that appear erroneously on the list — or that vanish from it due to technical failures — create ambiguity that can be exploited by unlicensed operators and obscures the compliance picture for legitimate charter buyers using the list as a diligence tool. The illegal charter problem is not hypothetical; safety investigations have repeatedly identified unqualified operators conducting revenue flights under arrangements that mimic legitimate charter. A public list plagued by phantom listings and attribution errors undermines the deterrent function the tool was designed to serve.
The data integrity episode also intersects with a parallel and more structurally significant regulatory development: the FAA's ongoing scrutiny of operators using Part 135 certification to conduct Part 380 public charter flights in ways that the agency views as circumventing Part 121 safety standards. FAA Notice N 8900.674, effective September 2023, required data collection on this practice, and a subsequent Notice of Intent signaled rulemaking to prohibit the arrangement outright. An NPRM on the Part 135/380 overlap drew approximately 60,000 public comments, reflecting how consequential the issue is for both operators and the traveling public. Taken together, the list deactivation and the pending Part 380 rulemaking represent two facets of the same underlying challenge: the FAA's regulatory framework for on-demand commercial operations is under pressure from both administrative execution failures and structural loopholes that the industry has learned to navigate in ways the agency is now moving to foreclose.
Pilots and aviation operators working in the Part 135 environment should treat the restored list as a useful but not definitive compliance reference, and maintain direct FSDO contact protocols as a backstop verification method. For Part 91 and 91K operators who may periodically wet-lease or interchange with certificated Part 135 carriers, confirming the counterparty's active certification status through official channels — rather than relying solely on the public spreadsheet — remains the operationally prudent standard regardless of whether the list is active or accurate at any given moment.