Two Nonprofits Sue FAA Over Policy Restricting Expense Reimbursement for Volunteer Pilots on Charitable Medical Flights

Wings of Mercy and the Air Care Alliance, two nonprofits that arrange charitable medical flights, have filed lawsuits against the Federal Aviation Administration over policies restricting volunteer pilots from receiving reimbursement for out-of-pocket flight expenses such as fuel, oil, and airport fees. Wings of Mercy has operated for 35 years, flying Michigan patients to medical appointments at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin Hospital, and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and is funded entirely by private donors with no payment from patients or insurers. Under current FAA rules, its volunteer pilots cannot be reimbursed for direct costs, and accepting even a free meal at the end of a flight is grounds for license suspension.

The FAA's position is that any exchange of money for transportation triggers commercial-flight safety standards. Critics cited in the dispute note that FAA regulations permit a pilot with as few as 20 flight hours to conduct volunteer flights without reimbursement, while a retired airline pilot with 30,000 hours would violate regulations by accepting even one dollar in reimbursement. Congress addressed the issue through the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which required the FAA to permit fuel reimbursement on charitable medical flights subject to enhanced safety requirements covering pilot training and experience; the FAA implemented that mandate by applying requirements comparable to those for for-profit charter operations, a burden the plaintiffs say most volunteer pilot organizations cannot meet.

The FAA separately allows pro-rata cost sharing on personal flights, letting pilots be reimbursed for a proportional share of costs based on passenger count, but has added requirements through interpretation rather than formal rulemaking that the plaintiffs say effectively bar volunteer pilots from using that mechanism. The lawsuits follow an FAA directive instructing inspectors to increase enforcement against volunteer pilots, which the plaintiffs say was triggered not by any accident or safety incident involving a volunteer pilot but by a paperwork error made by a separate organization using the 2012 fuel-reimbursement program. The two cases proceed on separate tracks: one in the Eastern District of Michigan challenging the FAA's interpretation of the 2012 statute, and one before the Sixth Circuit challenging the agency's attempt to modify its pro-rata reimbursement rules through interpretation rather than regulation.

Volunteer medical-flight networks sit at an odd regulatory seam: the FAA treats any reimbursement as a step toward commercial-operator obligations, even when the flight carries no fare and the organization takes no payment from patients or insurers. That seam is why a 20-hour private pilot can fly a mission for free while a 30,000-hour retired airline captain cannot accept a single dollar toward fuel without risking enforcement — the rule tracks the presence of money, not the pilot's experience or the aircraft's safety record.

The litigation also tests how much latitude an agency retains to narrow a congressional mandate through interpretation once a court no longer owes that interpretation automatic deference. Both cases lean on the Supreme Court's 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which eliminated Chevron deference, making this as much a test of post-Chevron agency rulemaking authority as it is a dispute about charitable flying.

The next milestones are the rulings themselves: whether the Eastern District of Michigan finds the FAA's 2012 implementation inconsistent with the statute's text, and whether the Sixth Circuit treats the pro-rata restrictions as an unlawful rule adopted without notice-and-comment rulemaking. Either outcome would reset how much informal guidance the FAA can use to narrow a reimbursement mechanism Congress or its own regulations already created.