Pastors and Planes – July LIFE Outreach unseats Liberty University as top user of private aircraft.

MinistryWatch, in collaboration with the Trinity Foundation, each month publishes a list of the private planes belonging to pastors and Christian ministries.

The list also includes basic information about their usage by pastors and ministries.

This month’s list is below. Here are a few highlights:

• The Trinity Foundation currently tracks 55 planes owned by more than 40 ministries.
• During June, these planes made a total of 442 flights. That’s up significantly from June’s 354 flights and May’s 390 flights.
• Operating costs were approximately $1.68 million for the month — up from June, which was $1.41 million, but down from May, which reached $1.72 million.
• In July, LIFE Outreach International (James Robison) unseated Liberty University as the top user of private aircraft, racking up an estimated $222,300 in flight operating costs. LIFE Outreach founder James Robison died in May of this year, and the ministry faces financial strain and continued questions of transparency. Prior to July, Liberty University had taken the top seat five months in a row.
• In June, the next largest user was Liberty University with $199,200, followed by Samaritan’s Purse who came in third with $173,825. In fourth place were ministries associated with Brazilian evangelist Edir Macedo with $111,250.
• One note about Samaritan’s Purse. Two of its planes — the King Air twin turboprops (N300SP and 350SP) — which normally fly in the United States, were busy in July providing disaster relief flights into Caracas, Venezuela, following the June 24, 2026 earthquake. However, “Pastors Planes also observed six flights to Destin, Florida, a popular summer vacation destination, where several televangelists own beach houses and beach condos,” Barry Bowen of the Trinity Foundation told MinistryWatch. “The United States tax code treats personal flights on ministry aircraft as a taxable fringe benefit.” We’ve included those planes on this month’s list, but their usage (totaling $153,800) was not factored into their total, listed above.

It is important to note that some Christian ministries—especially disaster relief and missionary organizations—have legitimate uses for airplanes, but the planes they’re using are not luxury jets that can go literally around the world at nearly the speed of sound. We have not included these cargo planes on this list.

If you find this information interesting or helpful, you might want to follow The Trinity Foundation’s daily X feed. You can find that account, @PastorPlanes, here.) But we think that for most people this monthly list will be more digestible and easier to read.

Access to MinistryWatch content is free. However, we hope you will support our work with your prayers and financial gifts. To make a donation, click here.

It’s important to name a couple of caveats regarding this list:

• Estimating operating costs is, at best, a rough art. Fuel costs vary widely and are constantly changing. Fixed costs per hour vary depending on the amount of time in the air. We used a variety of publicly available sources to arrive at the operating costs lists, using the assumption that the plane would fly 200 hours per year.
• A takeoff and landing is considered one flight. Half flights usually indicate an overnight flight in which the plane took off at the end of one month and landed on the first day of the next month.
• We can’t be sure who is using these planes, or for what purpose. It’s possible that the ministries are leasing or chartering the flights to others to generate income. However, if that’s the case, the ministry would normally have to declare that income as “unrelated business income.” We can find no evidence that any of these ministries are doing that, though it’s also important to note that most of the ministries on this list do not file Form 990s.

It’s also important to note that this list does not include ministries who use “fractional ownership” services such as NetJets. Neither does this list indicate if the aircraft is for ministry or personal use. Using ministry resources for personal use is not strictly prohibited by IRS regulations, but the use of the aircraft would have to be counted as income. The IRS almost never investigates tax-exempt organizations. Of the nearly 2-million tax-exempt organizations in the country, less than 10,000 get audited each year—that’s one-tenth of 1%.  And the number audited in many years is closer to 5,000.

MinistryWatch considers the use of private aircraft for the transportation of executives and staff to be excessive. It should be a significant red flag for donors. To see other warning signs donors should heed before donating to a ministry, click here.