Solairus Aviation Closes Acquisition of Clay Lacy Charter and Management Business

Solairus Aviation has completed its acquisition of Clay Lacy Aviation's aircraft management and charter business, according to an internal email sent to employees this morning. The companies had announced the combination in early August, with the deal originally expected to close by the end of September.

Solairus founder and CEO Dan Drohan told employees in a memo that the closing marks a "new and important moment for Solairus and for our small part of the broader aviation industry," while cautioning that "there is still much work to do." Following the acquisition, Solairus will have approximately 200 aircraft on its Part 135 charter certificate and around 500 aircraft under management overall. Solairus currently ranks as the 7th-largest U.S. operator by charter and fractional flight hours, while Clay Lacy ranks 17th.

Drohan noted that when including Part 91 flight hours, Solairus recorded 85,067 hours in 2025, which would rank it fourth in the industry behind only NetJets, Flexjet, and Vista Global, according to ARGUS data. He also highlighted that more than 135 consent assignments had been received from Clay Lacy aircraft management clients, describing it as "a remarkable testament to the relationships those clients built with Clay Lacy and its team." The integration will proceed in two phases, with the first beginning at today's closing and November 1 set as the next major milestone.

Deals like this one sit within a broader pattern of consolidation among aircraft management and charter operators, where scale in fleet size and flight hours increasingly determines competitive standing rather than organic growth alone. Managed-aircraft and charter businesses depend heavily on client consent to transfer existing management agreements, since each aircraft owner must individually agree to move their aircraft under the acquiring operator's certificate — the more than 135 consent assignments Drohan cited is a direct measure of how much of Clay Lacy's existing book actually transferred.

The combined entity's position relative to NetJets, Flexjet and Vista Global will depend on how flight-hour rankings are measured going forward, since Drohan's fourth-place estimate relies on including Part 91 hours alongside the charter and fractional figures that typically anchor industry rankings. Whether that broader measure becomes the standard comparison, or whether charter-and-fractional-only rankings remain the reference point, will shape how the deal is read across the sector.

The next concrete marker is November 1, the date Solairus has set for the second phase of integration. How client consents, aircraft transfers and personnel integration proceed between now and then will determine whether the combined fleet counts and hour totals Drohan described hold up in practice.