$2.96 million. That’s the first-year tax savings available to a business buyer who places an $8 million pre-owned jet into service after January 19, 2025, at a 37% effective rate. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, made that arithmetic possible by permanently restoring 100% bonus depreciation for qualifying business aircraft. The benefit had declined steadily for years, dropping to 60% in 2024 and 40% for the opening weeks of the current year.
The provision carries no sunset clause. Unlike the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s version of bonus depreciation, which was written from the start to expire, this one has no programmed end date. Buyers can plan acquisitions without modeling a legislative cliff.
The pre-owned jet market had been drifting toward buyer-favorable conditions before the legislation passed. Following the 2020–2022 demand surge, inventory normalized: pricing concessions returned and average time-on-market lengthened, a reversal from years of compressed inventory and seller leverage. Qualified buyers who had been priced out earlier were finding options. The tax restoration adds a calculable financial argument on top of that market positioning.
Sergey Petrossov runs Aero Ventures, an AI-driven marketplace for pre-owned aircraft transactions at $10 million and above, to operate in exactly this kind of environment: one where buyers need verified pricing data to run precise acquisition math before committing.
A Two-Sided Tax Picture
The IRS launched a dedicated business aircraft audit campaign in February 2024 against large corporations, large partnerships, and high-income earners. IRS News Release IR-2024-46 defined the campaign’s focus: whether companies are properly allocating aircraft use between qualifying business activities and personal or entertainment flights. As reported by Grant Thornton, the IRS described its scope as “all aspects of the business aircraft lifecycle, from acquisition to operation to disposition.”
The documentation requirements are demanding. IRS training materials detail what investigators expect: complete flight logs with dates, origins, destinations, and flight times; passenger manifests identifying each traveler’s relationship to the company; written business purpose records for every flight segment; aircraft purchase and lease agreements; and full depreciation calculations. Commuting flights are not deductible. Entertainment flights are not deductible. Employees who use company aircraft for personal purposes must have the benefit imputed as compensation, generally based on charter rates or Standard Industry Fare Level figures.
The depreciation benefit itself carries an ongoing compliance condition. An aircraft claimed under 100% bonus depreciation must maintain business use above 50% (the predominant-use test) in every subsequent year. Falling below that threshold triggers recapture of previously claimed deductions. The potential savings are large on paper. The records required to protect them must be built from the day the aircraft enters service and maintained every year thereafter.
The IRS audit campaign has continued with no signs of retreat following the administration change. For businesses acquiring aircraft on the strength of the restored depreciation benefit, compliance documentation must be in place before any auditor requests it. Records built after the fact offer little protection.
Where Aero Ventures Operates
Aero Ventures, the AI-driven aircraft transaction marketplace where Sergey Petrossov is managing partner, was built for exactly this type of market. Bill Papariella, who built Jet Edge from four aircraft to more than 100 aircraft and $600 million in revenue before Vista Global’s $750 million acquisition in 2022 and serves as CEO of Aero Ventures, founded the company in 2024. The Aero Ventures Marketplace launched September 3, 2025. The founding team has collectively completed more than $54 billion in aircraft transactions. The platform was built to address a foundational problem: pre-owned jet transactions had long operated without reliable pricing data. True sale prices were treated as proprietary. Buyers and sellers made multimillion-dollar decisions on broker estimates and incomplete market references.
The Aero Ventures AI platform closes that gap. It aggregates real transaction prices, not asking prices or broker estimates, and produces instant fair market valuations. Absorption rates, five-year ownership cost simulations, residual value forecasts, and comparative charter economics layer on top of that pricing foundation. Off-market aircraft appear alongside publicly listed inventory. Buyers see the full available market in their target category, not only what a single broker carries.
The model draws on real estate market architecture. Rather than replacing human advisory relationships, Aero Ventures built the AI-powered platform as an engagement gateway: clients can “window shop” and test ownership scenarios independently, the same way successful real estate AI platforms have driven consumer interaction before any transaction conversation begins. Clients exploring aircraft acquisition don’t necessarily want to call their broker every time they’re curious about what a Challenger 350 is trading for. The platform provides that access on their own terms, and advisory relationships deepen naturally when buyers are ready to move.
A buyer calculating the tax benefit on a potential acquisition needs verified sale data, not estimates. Overpaying for an aircraft erodes the net gain. The Aero Ventures AI system’s emphasis on true transaction prices gives buyers the foundation to run that analysis accurately before committing.
The company pairs that AI-driven market intelligence with capital deployment. Bridge financing and guaranteed purchase offers give buyers an accelerated path to close, relevant specifically for transactions where the buyer is targeting a year-end service date to secure the current tax year’s deduction. Aero Ventures targets transactions of $10 million or more and reports the ability to deliver firm offers within 48 hours.
Petrossov’s Track Record
Petrossov built JetSmarter, which reached unicorn valuation, before Vista Global’s 2019 acquisition. He subsequently ran the combined XO business as President of XO and was Chief Growth & Digital Officer of Vista Global. That tenure coincided with a shift in the private aviation customer base: a younger, tech-native buyer cohort had arrived expecting the same immediacy from aviation that consumer AI platforms delivered elsewhere. Real-time pricing, transparent availability data, and on-demand decision tools had become the baseline, not a differentiator.
The AI operational infrastructure Petrossov built at JetSmarter confronted structurally similar data problems to those Aero Ventures now faces. Dynamic pricing, demand aggregation, and fleet utilization all required real-time processing of fragmented, incomplete market information. Producing accurate valuations for assets priced in the tens of millions poses the same kind of challenge at a different price point.
Market Scale
The active pre-owned private jet segment runs an estimated $12–15 billion. That’s the market Aero Ventures’ AI-driven transaction infrastructure is built to address. The OBBA’s permanent depreciation provision accelerates portions of that demand, particularly among businesses with year-end acquisition windows and sufficient qualifying business use to clear the 50% threshold.
Not every buyer benefits equally. Elevated interest rates remain a headwind for financed acquisitions. Business sentiment has stayed cautious heading into late 2025. The tax incentive delivers most to cash-rich buyers and businesses with access to favorable financing. That profile maps directly to the $10 million-plus tier Aero Ventures targets.
Compliance Meets Transparency
The IRS audit campaign and the OBBA’s 100% depreciation provision are connected in operational terms. A business claiming full first-year depreciation on an $8 million aircraft is precisely the type of transaction the IRS campaign was built to review. The documentation that protects the deduction, including flight logs, business purpose records, and passenger characterizations, must exist before any auditor requests it, not in response to one.
Aero Ventures’ AI-driven transaction infrastructure produces that documentation foundation from the acquisition forward. Verified fair market valuations, real transaction price histories, and complete aircraft data are built into the platform’s output. A purchase grounded in documented, AI-verified pricing is a different legal and accounting starting point than one based on informal broker guidance and market inference.
Private aviation’s tax conditions haven’t converged this sharply in years. Permanent 100% bonus depreciation, an active federal audit program focused on aircraft deductions, and a buyer-favorable pre-owned inventory market are all present simultaneously. Aircraft acquisition decisions now carry financial planning weight they didn’t carry when the depreciation benefit was shrinking each year.
Aero Ventures’ AI-powered marketplace offers verified transaction pricing, machine learning-based ownership cost modeling, off-market access, and rapid financing. That profile matches the market this tax environment is producing.
