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.

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.”