Records confirm Ron DeSantis’ "political stunt" flights landed in Florida Panhandle

Using a charter broker just raised a $61,000 question.

Exclusively obtained public records help to explain why two charter flights hired by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis landed in a public airport in northwest Florida as part of his deceptive, potentially illegal political stunt targeting 50 Venezuelan immigrants.

Significantly, the newly released documents from Okaloosa County incontrovertibly places the two chartered aircrafts inside Florida after arriving from Texas.

It also confirms the state’s use of the two charter planes having tail numbers N359SK and N411FJ to transport 50 Venezuelan immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Click here to view the records.

That’s an important point for those who believe Governor DeSantis overstepped his authority under the state’s 2022 budget which contains a line authorizing transportation from the state but not into the state.

“With the aid of Florida’s sunshine law we were able to quickly verify certain facts because the airport Ron DeSantis decided to use as part of this scheme was a county airport,” says attorney Daniel Uhlfelder, who helped expedite the records request. “Even the Governor isn’t able to escape disclosure and cover up his misdeeds.“

An interview with a civil aviation expert reveals the state may have paid as much as $61,000 to its charter flight broker, just in fees, to retain the jets used to transport migrants across state lines this week, which Florida’s Governor bragged about to political donors last week.

Another member of the Florida Cabinet called it a “political stunt” and asked the Department of Justice to investigate.

Okaloosa County owns Bob Sikes Airport (CEW) and the records from its Fixed Base Operator indicate that the two planes owned by Ultimate Air Shuttle and chartered by Vertol Systems Company Inc. of Destin, Florida on behalf of the state, show that each plane fueled up using a Shell aviation credit card.

In addition to taking on a combined $4606 worth of Jet A fuel at CEW, the records show that both planes discharged their lavatories after their initial 750-mile journey. It’s just over 1,400 miles from Crestview to Martha’s Vineyard.

But that wouldn’t be enough to get to its final destination.

The approximately twenty-year-old Fairchild-Dornier 328 aircraft frames have a range of approximately 1,700 miles when equipped with a long-range fuel tank, but the Ultimate Jet Charters website says their version has only a 1,000 mile range with 30 passengers.

According to publicly available flight data, one of the planes stopped in Charlotte, North Carolina and the other in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Chad Trautvetter is the news editor of Aviation International News and AINOnline.com, as well as its daily newsletter. He explained that anyone with “a phone can become a charter flight broker” and that “typically brokers earn about 10% of the overall airfare, unless they’re charging a flat fee.”

Florida taxpayers didn’t just pay to fly the Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts.

“The charter company would’ve charged for the reposition flight which they call an “empty leg” that is included in the price,” said Trautvetter. “The state paid for the leg down from Ohio and Charlotte too.”

The two charter flights contracted by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) picked up the asylum seekers and departed from San Antonio, Texas, on the morning of Wednesday, September 14th at an apparent cost of $615,000 per records unearthed by Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Charlie Crist and shared in a tweet.

FDOT contracted with Vertol to hire Ultimate Shuttles for the flights.

Charlie Crist @CharlieCrist

Ron won’t answer questions so we looked ourselves: FL paid Vertol Systems $615,000 on Sept 8th out of the $12m deportation fund. So Floridians paid $12,300 for each refugee DeSantis trafficked for his own political purposes. More to come.

Vertol Systems Company Inc. started in Oregon but moved to Florida recently, according to Forensic News, who reported exclusively on its contracts with recently sanctioned Russian aviation companies. The company took its website down this weekend after its role as a charter broker to the state was revealed, but a video screen capture shows how it looked on Friday:

According to the migrants on the plane and local sources in San Antonio, a Texas woman known only as “Perla” recruited the Venezuelan immigrants onto the flight under false pretenses.

She told them they were going to Boston.

From the Lonestar State, both airplanes flew directly to Crestview, Florida, before making separate stops in the Carolinas before transporting the asylum seekers eventually to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Trautvetter raised serious questions about the operator’s requirements under Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) regulations requiring all passengers to be identified and disclosed on commercially operated charters.

“Did they issue IDs to asylum seekers?” he asked. “How did the charter operators verify those IDs?”

“As a charter company, they would have to know who is on board, so they would have to collect IDs from all of the passengers,” the news editor explained. “After 9/11, the government started mandating that you have to know who’s on board and verify it with ID checks.”  

“The charter company may have broken TSA regulations by not verifying the passengers IDs if it did not do so. But that’s just a guess.”

A Freedom of Information Act request seeking flight plans and manifests to the FAA still hasn’t been answered.

The Executive Office of the Governor of Florida has confirmed reciept of seven public records request seeking details about the flights, but has not yet produced any records.