Clay Lacy Brand Guidelines: A 1968 Van Nuys Jet Charter Firm Refocused on FBOs

A jet charter company at a Los Angeles airfield.

Clay Lacy Aviation was founded in 1968 at Van Nuys Airport in Los Angeles by the pilot Clay Lacy, whose name it carries. English Wikipedia describes the business as starting out as an on-demand jet charter operator; the company’s own history calls it “the first jet charter company west of the Mississippi.” Its home page still uses the line “A Standard of Excellence Since 1968,” and its corporate headquarters remains at Van Nuys.

Over the following decade the firm added aircraft management and maintenance to charter, English Wikipedia says. In 1981 it opened what the company calls an all-jet FBO at its Van Nuys headquarters, and its timeline records the facility doubling in size in 1984. The company also says that in 1998 and 1999 it was the first in the United States to offer a Gulfstream GV and a Boeing Business Jet for charter.

The business spread north before it spread east. In 2002 it opened a full-service FBO and jet centre at Boeing Field in Seattle, adding a 40,000-square-foot hangar there in 2009, English Wikipedia says; in December 2018 it sold the Seattle operation, though its website still lists maintenance at Boeing Field. Leadership passed to Brian Kirkdoffer, a pilot who joined in 1990: the company says he became president in 2003 and president and chief executive in 2012, English Wikipedia gives 2006 for the presidency and says he acquired a majority interest in 2013, and he is now chairman.

Key Air, Orange County and the Northeast.

The move east came through an acquisition. Clay Lacy took over Key Air, an aircraft charter and management firm at Waterbury-Oxford Airport in Connecticut, which the company and English Wikipedia date to 2016 and Aviation Week dated to 2015. That gave it a flight operations and maintenance centre within reach of New York. In May 2024 Aviation Week reported that Clay Lacy was about to open a new 120,000-square-foot hangar complex with its own FBO terminal at the airport, after breaking ground in August 2022; the company’s timeline records the Oxford FBO as opening in 2024, its third.

The second FBO had come in Southern California. In September 2020 the Orange County Board of Supervisors awarded Clay Lacy a 35-year leasehold at John Wayne Airport, and the company began operating there in January 2021, English Wikipedia says; work on a larger permanent FBO and hangar complex there began in November 2024. A fourth FBO, at Friedman Memorial Airport in Sun Valley, Idaho, was awarded in November 2024 and is planned for completion in 2027.

Maintenance runs alongside the terminals. The company runs FAA Part 145 repair stations at Van Nuys and Oxford, and English Wikipedia says Embraer extended its authorised service centre designation at Van Nuys in January 2020 to cover Legacy and Praetor jets, after Phenom work since 2009. In March 2024 Clay Lacy became a dealer and installer for Starlink satellite internet on business jets.

Sustainability became part of the brand story from 2020. English Wikipedia lists a solar array on the Van Nuys headquarters in January 2021, a carbon-neutral rating for its facilities from the private-aviation rating programme 4AIR in February 2021, and certification to the National Air Transportation Association’s sustainability standard in December 2021. The company says it was the first company to hold all four of its sustainability accreditations — from 4AIR, NATA, the EPA and NBAA — and that its FBOs have been carbon neutral since 2019.

Design and documentation.

Business aviation companies sell something most visitors will never see in person, so their websites lean on photography and lists. Operators show cabins and aircraft on the ramp, as the companies themselves choose to publish them, and they tend to organise fleet pages by aircraft type — a turboprop, a super-midsize jet, a large-cabin Gulfstream or Bombardier — rather than by destination. Gama Aviation’s charter pages, for example, name individual types from the Citation Mustang to the Gulfstream G550.

FBO networks, the private terminals and hangars that serve business aircraft at airports, present themselves through places. Their websites carry location maps and airport pages that list lounges, crew rest rooms, hangarage, fuel and meeting rooms, often with airport codes and opening hours. Hangars appear as much as aircraft do, because the building is the product: Gama, for one, publishes separate pages for its facilities at Glasgow, Jersey and Sharjah.

Membership and charter programmes are a third strand. Operators describe jet cards, memberships and fixed-rate schemes in their own terms — deposit levels, guaranteed availability, capped hourly rates — and trade titles such as Private Jet Card Comparisons track and compare them. VistaJet, XO and, before its sale in 2022, Jet Edge all built consumer offers around such programmes, and Jet Edge ran branded lounges at Van Nuys and Teterboro.

Ownership changes often. Investment firms, listed groups and larger operators buy and merge these businesses, and a brand can disappear into its parent’s name, as Jet Edge’s operators did when Vista formed Vista America in 2023. This guide records who founded each company, who owns it and how it presents itself, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Charter and management move to Solairus.

The company changed shape in 2026. On 7 August 2026 Solairus Aviation of Petaluma, California, announced an agreement to buy Clay Lacy’s aircraft management and charter divisions. At the time Solairus managed about 360 aircraft and Clay Lacy about 140, the companies said, so the combined fleet would pass 500. Under the deal, Clay Lacy’s FBO, maintenance and real estate businesses stay stand-alone under the Clay Lacy name with their current ownership; Kirkdoffer said Clay Lacy would continue as “a focused aviation infrastructure platform built around FBOs, aviation real estate, and aircraft maintenance.”

Solairus closed the first part of the purchase on 2 October 2026, Aero-News Network reported, after more than 135 Clay Lacy aircraft owners agreed to move their aircraft. Clay Lacy’s website now opens with a notice that the management and charter divisions “have been acquired by Solairus Aviation” and directs those enquiries there, while describing a new focus on “a nationwide network of exceptional FBOs, supported by maintenance and AOG capabilities.”

That leaves an unusual brand position. The name was built on a founder and on flying — charter, management and aircraft firsts — and now has to carry an airport business of terminals, hangars, fuel and repair shops at Van Nuys, Orange County, Oxford and, from 2027, Sun Valley. The company’s own word for its service is “legendary,” and its history page closes by saying the team continues “to fulfill our founder’s legendary vision.”

For a design guide, Clay Lacy shows how a founder’s name can outlast the business it was first attached to and move onto the ground. Compare Atlantic Aviation, a far larger FBO network, and NetJets, a private-jet operator built on shared aircraft ownership. For this guide we use a charcoal, a sand and a copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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