Pastors and Planes – September Costs spent on private planes by ministry at top of list is almost double that of No. 2.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Barry Bowen of The Trinity Foundation compiled the flight information for this project. This month’s spreadsheet contains flights by Christian ministries during the month of September.

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 63 planes owned by more than 40 ministries.
• During September, these planes made a total of 375 flights. That’s pretty level with August flights, which numbered 380. Both are up from July, which numbered 307 flights.
• Operating costs were approximately $1.86 million for the month—down slightly from August’s $1.9 million. In July, operating costs were at $1.43 million. These costs do not include the cost of the plane itself.
• The three biggest users of private aircraft remain the same as past months. Samaritan’s Purse came in first well above everyone else at $469,208—that’s more than $100,000 more than its August costs of $338,025. Trailing behind in second was Liberty University ($239,400), and Assemblies of God in third ($125,480).
• Other big users of private aircraft were Creflo Dollar ($114,950), Brazilian televangelist Edir Macedo ($108,100), and the church founded by Kenneth Copeland, Eagle Mountain International Church ($97,870).

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.

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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.

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.