Pastors and Planes – May 2024

Christian ministries took more than 440 flights on private aircraft in May

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Barry Bowen of The Trinity Foundation compiled the flight information for this project.

In February 2023, MinistryWatch launched a collaboration with the Trinity Foundation to publish a list of all the private planes belonging to pastors and Christian ministries. For several months we updated that list, but – as things sometimes do – the monthly publication of that list went on hiatus.

But we’re back! Beginning last month, we will publish a list of planes and some 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 64 ministries that have airplanes.
• During May, these planes made a total of 440 flights.
• Operating costs alone topped $2 million for the month. These costs do not include the cost of the plane itself.
• Liberty University is by far the biggest user of private aircraft. It typically holds that position month in and month out.

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.

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It’s important to name a couple of important 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 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 one percent.  And the number audited in many years is closer to 5,000.

It is also 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.