- June 5, 2026
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Nearly five years after launching the private jet membership company AeroVanti to great fanfare, CEO Patrick Britton-Harr is facing more than a century in federal prison.
The Sarasota and Maryland businessman was convicted June 3 by a Baltimore jury for committing wire fraud and bilking customers out of $15 million.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, each of the six counts he was found guilty of carries a 20-year prison sentence.
Britton-Harr, 43, is also awaiting trial on a second indictment. In that one he is accused by federal prosecutors in Maryland of defrauding Medicare.
Last week’s conviction is not the end of the story.
But it is a key milestone in a saga that saw a once-celebrated entrepreneur exposed as schemer who defrauded investors, including his own brother, to enrich himself.
And, as it turned out, it wasn’t the first time he turned to fraud, prosecutors say.
This story, of what has transpired since Britton-Harr burst onto the scene in 2021 with what many saw as an innovative idea, is based on previous reporting by, and stories in, the Business Observer.
Britton-Harr, who in the early days of AeroVanti would answer texts, emails and phones calls, did not respond to a request for comment last week.
The last time he spoke to the Business Observer was June 2023. Before that, in late summer 2022, he showed up to a photo shoot and interview for the Business Observer's 40 under 40 issue in Sarasota in a shiny white Range Rover, with his wife, who he said was a mentor, and a small dog.
Patrick Britton-Harr first came to the attention of local business watchers in 2021 shorty after starting AeroVanti, a company based in Sarasota and Annapolis, Maryland.
The idea: sell Top Gun memberships for $150,000 to groups that would share the use of private planes bought from the proceeds of the memberships.
In the interview for the 40 under 40 issue, the then 38-year-old Britton-Harr said AeroVanti had generated $200 million in revenue its first year in business.
“I’m a serial entrepreneur,” he said at the time. “I love the building process.”
Just a couple of weeks later, AeroVanti announced a $100 million investment led by Lafayette Aircraft Leasing. The company said at the time it had experienced 400% growth since being founded.
Press releases about marketing deals with sports teams soon followed as did a February 2023 announcement that it was adding yacht charters to its business model.
In May 2023, the company sponsored a car that ran in the Coca Cola 600 NASCAR race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
By June and early July 2023, though, news began to leak out that all was not well with AeroVanti.
And not long after customers began to file lawsuits claiming the company had sold $150,000 Top Gun memberships for planes that had been repossessed. There were allegations its fleet had been grounded while it poured money into pro sports and other sponsorships. Amnd there were questions about the veracity of its claims about the $100 million in funding it had announced.
Britton-Harr, in a June 30, 2023, text to the Business Observer responding to questions about the company and fleet, disputed the allegations saying, “we just had a plane fly yesterday, and we will have another one today. We are flying every day. We are totally operational.”
Several weeks later, sometime around July 25, Britton-Harr resigned as CEO and chairman of AeroVanti’s board.
Scott Hopes, a former Manatee County administrator, was named CEO.
Hopes didn’t last long.
On Oct. 14 he was fired. He was replaced by Todd Britton-Harr — Patrick Britton-Harr’s older brother.
Whatever ambitions Todd Britton-Harr entered with, they too were soon dashed.
His reign as CEO lasted three days.
Todd Britton-Harr, who accuses Hopes of mismanagement and worse, told the Business Observer in May 2024 that he stepped down after learning money meant to pay for legal expenses had not been paid out and that default judgements had been issued after the company failed to put up a defense.
He says he also learned on taking over that an offer for a $25 million investment to help sustain the company had been rescinded.
AeroVanti was again insolvent. A bridge loan Todd Britton-Harr helped secure using three his construction company owned could not be repaid.
Patrick Britton-Harr rejoined AeroVanti as CEO soon after, its third top leader in 17 days.
As Britton-Harr’s AeroVanti was unraveling, he also faaced legal troubles from his time running a company during the pandemic.
On July 18, 2023, the Business Observer reported that the Justice Department, through the FBI’s Baltimore field office, had filed a civil complaint alleging Britton-Harr submitted “claims to Medicare for laboratory tests that were not ordered by health care providers, not medically necessary and sometimes never performed.”
According to a 2025 indictment in that case, prosecutors alleged that during the pandemic Britton-Harr offered Covid screening tests to nursing home patients across the country and then, through a company he owned, Provista Health, fraudulently billed Medicare for respiratory pathogen panel tests for these patients.
The tests, the Justice Department contended, “were medically unnecessary, were never ordered by a treating physician as required and many were never actually performed, including for patients who had died.”
The company allegedly filed $15 million in fraudulent claims for tests of which Medicare paid $5 million.
Britton-Harr is charged five counts of health care fraud and one count of money laundering in that case.
Even before the Medicare fraud indictment, Britton-Harr was already in trouble with federal authorities overseeing the investigation.
On Nov. 30, 2023, federal prosecutors filed a motion asking U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander to order Britton-Harr and multiple healthcare companies he founded and ran to be punished after repeatedly failing to comply with court orders.
The judge found him in contempt, and he was ordered to pay $575,000.
It was later learned, that just days after a $30 million judgement was entered against him stemming from the Medicare case, Britton-Harr sold a house in Annapolis, Maryland, in violation of a court order.
The proceeds were the transferred to AeroVanti as he pleaded poverty — unable to pay the $575,000 court fine.
On May 8, 2025, Britton-Harr, then living in South Carolina, was indicted by a grand jury and arrested for his actions at AeroVanti. He was charged with six counts of wire fraud.
According to the 11-page indictment, he allegedly took more than $14.7 million from the company to enrich himself, in a scheme prosecutors say involved lying to investors and members in order to keep the company running and the money coming in.
Between April 2022 and October 2022 — the same month he was in the Business Observer's 40 under 40 issue — Britton-Harr had 28 disbursals of escrowed money from the Top Gun funds deposited into two AeroVanti checking accounts he controlled.
The disbursals, according to the indictment, totaled about $14.7 million.
That money was then moved into checking accounts belonging to Britton-Harr and his wife, Tracy Deckman and used for rent payments, boat purchases, living expenses and jewelry. (Deckman is not named in the indictment and is referred to as T.D. by prosecutors.)
Prosecutors, In the indictment, cited six of the alleged transfers from AeroVanti accounts to Britton-Harr’s accounts.
In May 2022, he is alleged to have wired $100,000 to his own account, $65,000 of which was spent at a jewelry store in Pensacola.
Two other transfers were used to buy boats and a third boat, a yacht named Triple Lindy, was bought in September for $306,000. The money for that allegedly came from a $1 million transfer.
As of Friday afternoon, it was unclear if Britton-Harr was in custody or if he was allowed to await sentencing as a free man. A spokesperson for U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Maryland did not respond to questions. Neither did Britton-Harr’s attorney, Gerald C. Ruter.
As for his sentence, that will be determined by a federal district court judge, who will consider the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors, the Justice Department says. The Medicare fraud case is scheduled to begin Oct. 13 in Baltimore.
