Episode 105 — empty legs, what actually drives a charter quote, and the three ways people get on a private aircraft. Fifty-three minutes, no sales pitch.
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Mountain Mule’s Tim sat down with Pat Sinnott, founder of Peak Aviation Solutions, in April 2026. They spent it on the parts of private aviation nobody advertises — why a repositioning leg sells cheap, what actually moves a charter quote, and the honest difference between chartering, buying a jet card and going fractional. Then the harder half: what it takes to build a business in this industry, and why it runs on relationships.
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The person you would actually be dealing with
Pat Sinnott has spent 21 years in private aviation and has overseen tens of thousands of flights. He flew for the first time at 16, at a summer flight camp he paid for out of his own savings, then took a Bachelor of Science in Flight Operations at Westminster College and worked through private, instrument, commercial and multi-engine ratings.
At 21 he took the operations path instead of the cockpit, because a working pilot’s schedule is hard on a family. He ran the CEO’s own accounts at Private Jet Services Group — executives, professional sports teams, touring musicians — then spent eight and a half years in Bozeman growing a startup from a single four-passenger Phenom 100 into a fleet of 21 aircraft, 14 of them on a Part 135 charter certificate. When that company was acquired in 2023 he founded Peak with the handful of clients who followed him. Three years on, most of what Peak flies is people those clients sent.
He is an NBAA member, based at Bozeman Yellowstone International (BZN). Calls and texts come straight to his phone.
Why a broker with no aircraft is the point
Peak is a charter brokerage, not an operator, and that is deliberate. Pat has been offered Part 135 certificates more than once and turned them down — owning aircraft would mean carrying inventory to push. With access to 5,000 aircraft and 5,000+ airports across the US and Canada, the only job is finding the right airplane for your trip at the most competitive price the market will give.
Three things do not move. Every operator and every crew is vetted through ARGUS TripCheq and Wyvern, crew-level, green report or the trip does not happen. Every quote is all-in, taxes and handling fees included, because surprise charges are how this industry loses people. And you deal with Pat — one point of contact from the first call to wheels down.
He also still thinks like a pilot, which changes how a trip gets managed. Weather, NOTAMs and temporary flight restrictions get checked the day before you fly, not the morning of, so problems get solved before you know they existed.
No membership fees. You pay for the flight, not the privilege of asking about one. We arrange — you fly.
Start where Pat told you to start
The flights he described on the episode are real. An operator flies a client one direction and the aircraft still has to get home, or get to its next pickup, with nobody on board. They would rather sell that leg cheap than fly it empty. Availability changes daily, sometimes hourly, and there is no hold period — the operator takes the first confirmed booking that fits the airplane.
Peak’s empty leg alerts are free, nationwide and arrive three times a week. No membership, no card to buy. Get on the list first, then talk about a specific trip when you have one.
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