About Aelion.
Aelion exists because private-charter pricing is opaque on purpose — and it doesn't have to be. We track the empty-leg market, model what charters actually cost, and publish both, plainly.
Who we are
Aelion LLC is a founder-run, California-based company building a regional private-aviation marketplace, launching region by region — live today in Southern California and the Bay Area and the New York Metro and the South Florida. At launch Aelion operates as an air charter broker under 14 CFR Part 295: every flight is operated by an FAA-certificated Part 135 direct air carrier, never by us. The full plain-English version of what that means is on our broker disclosures page.
Where the market data comes from
The empty-leg listings on this site are observed on public market sources, attributed per listing, and refreshed through the day. We normalize every price to an all-in figure — we measure each source's checkout taxes and fees and include them, so the number you see is what checkout actually totals. The small share of listings from sources we haven't measured yet is marked as such on the listing, and we keep measuring. Listings that go stale drop off automatically, and every market page shows when its data was last updated. We label obviously implausible published prices as unpriced rather than passing them along.
How the cost estimator works
The charter cost estimator is a model built from published industry rate structures: class hourly rates, billable time with the ~2-hour daily minimum, repositioning multipliers, the fees layer, and federal excise tax. It is deliberately independent of the scraped market data — the model never reads observed prices, so neither number can quietly corrupt the other. Its output is always labeled an estimate, never a quote, and every result itemizes the drivers so you can see why the range is what it is.
Content standards
Everything factual on this site is held to a simple bar: specific, checkable claims — airport histories, FBO lists, named-model details — are verified against primary sources before publication, dated, and re-verified on a schedule; where we couldn't verify something, we say less rather than guess. Aircraft photos are licensed and credited on the page. Conceptual explanations of how the industry works are written from published industry practice and hedged where practice varies.
What we promise
- All-in prices — checkout taxes and fees included, the rare unverified listing marked as such — and Aelion never adds fees of its own.
- Estimates labeled as estimates. Ranges, drivers, and honest caveats — never fake precision.
- Market listings attributed to their sources, never dressed up as our own inventory.
- Broker status disclosed plainly, everywhere it matters.
Contact
Questions, corrections, quotes: info@goaelion.com. Operators interested in listing aircraft: operators@goaelion.com. We read everything.