FLOAT Alaska's New Pacific Sale Stalls After $3.1M Funding Miss

FLOAT Alaska's confirmed chapter 11 plan needed a second round of court approval before its sponsor could close: after plan sponsor Owners Jet missed its original deadline to deliver the $3.1 million contribution needed to complete the reorganization of New Pacific Airlines, the debtors negotiated a revised stipulation, and the court approved the modification on July 7, 2026, raising the contribution to $3.3 million and preserving a certification path to substitute back-up bidder Kamboj Ventures if Owners Jet still had not funded by July 8. The combined plan was confirmed on June 18, 2026, splitting the failed Alaska aviation group along two paths — New Pacific Airlines reorganizing under Owners Jet while the remaining estates liquidate through a Liquidating Trust — and the docket reviewed through July 17, 2026 shows no certification substituting Kamboj, though the record does not separately confirm that Owners Jet completed funding. The case's largest contested claim also cleared in the same window: the court approved a Rule 9019 settlement resolving Private Jet Services' $18.86 million charter-damages claim on July 10, and PJS withdrew the claim with prejudice on July 16. The plan arrived after a sale process that auctioned the group's Boeing 757 fleet, aircraft parts, and equity interests in tranches, then channeled the leftover value — the np.com domain, retained causes of action, and avoidance claims — into the trust for creditors.

The case began on January 26, 2026, when FLOAT Alaska LLC and six affiliates filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware under lead case number 26-10075, with the First Day Declaration and sale motion showing the estates had entered court to preserve aircraft, operating authorities, and intellectual property long enough to market substantially all assets under section 363. The parent of Ravn Alaska and New Pacific had already stopped flying before the filing, so this was a sale-and-wind-down from the start rather than an operating reorganization.

Principal investor Josh Jones and his entity Jones Holding LLC sit at the center of the case on both sides of the ledger. The Final DIP Order and the committee objection show Jones as prepetition secured lender, debtor-in-possession financier, equity holder, and ultimately the buyer of the group's stake in Aleutian Airways — a concentration that drove the most contested fights of the case.

Debtor(s)	FLOAT Alaska LLC (7 jointly administered entities)
Primary Brands	Ravn Alaska, New Pacific Airlines, FlyCoin
Court	U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware
Case Number	26-10075
Petition Date	January 26, 2026
Confirmation Date	June 18, 2026
Judge	Hon. Craig T. Goldblatt
Claims Agent	Stretto, Inc.
Plan Sponsor	Owners Jet ($3.3 million for Reorganized New Pacific Airlines equity, raised from $3.1 million in a July 2026 modification)
DIP Facility	Jones Holding LLC superpriority facility up to $3.33 million, with cashless roll-up

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From Northern Pacific to a Statewide Shutdown

FLOAT's business mix never fit one airline category. The group started as Float Shuttle, a Southern California commuter-air startup that bought Ravn's core assets in 2020 out of the earlier Ravn Air Group bankruptcy. The First Day Declaration says FLOAT paid $8 million for federal operating certificates from PenAir and Corvus plus six Dash-8 aircraft and one Saab 340, restarting service to remote Alaska communities where 82% of communities are not connected to the road system.

The more ambitious piece was New Pacific Airlines, originally pitched as Northern Pacific. The carrier's strategy was to connect Asia and North America through Anchorage using Boeing 757 aircraft on shorter great-circle routings. After a trademark dispute with BNSF, the airline rebranded as New Pacific Airlines in August 2023. The third line, FlyCoin, was a crypto-based loyalty program built around tokens customers could earn and spend; the declaration says FlyCoin raised a $33 million seed round led by Jones in 2022 and lent $28 million to Northern Pacific to help launch the transpacific strategy.

The First Day Declaration attributes the collapse to pressure across all three business lines rather than a single trigger, beginning with the transpacific thesis. The original North Pacific route plan assumed viable overflight patterns between North America and Asia, which became unworkable after the United States barred Russian aircraft from U.S. airspace in late February 2022 and Russia closed its own airspace to carriers from dozens of nations. IATA later described how the conflict forced carriers onto longer routings, and management says New Pacific lacked the ETOPS capability needed to adapt the concept quickly.

Crypto stress hit FlyCoin at the same time. The declaration says the cryptocurrency market fell from $2.9 trillion in November 2021 to about $798 billion by the end of 2022, disrupting FlyCoin's partner network and banking relationships during a period when major platforms failed and token prices dropped. Labor pressure compounded the damage: Alaska carriers were struggling to find pilots as the sector faced a structural pilot shortfall, and management says the debtors lost roughly 80% of their pilot positions in a single year, forcing route cuts and layoffs while Aleutian Airways entered Ravn's important Dutch Harbor market.

The Alaska network kept shrinking before the shutdown. Reporting in 2024 described 130 job cuts at Ravn Alaska, and Alaska Public Media later chronicled how communities coped after Ravn pulled out of the Aleutians. New Pacific had already ended scheduled flying and shifted to charters by early 2024, matching the declaration's account that the Ontario operation needed at least five new markets to break even while the combined businesses burned about $5 million of cash per month.

The final stage came in 2025. Ravn Alaska shut down statewide flights in August after a Canadian lessor repossessed Dash-8 aircraft, and Alaska Public Media reported that Ravn called it quits. The shutdown ended nearly 77 years of service tracing to Economy Helicopters, founded in 1948. Ravn operated its final flight on August 5 from Valdez to Anchorage, severing subsidized Essential Air Service routes that remote communities relied on as a transport lifeline. On the charter side, a missed payment created a payroll shortfall that forced the group to stop flying. The Private Jet Services proof of claim says New Pacific ceased all flight operations on November 26, 2025 and that PJS terminated the charter agreement for cause that same day, the day after the airline that planned to fly Alaskans to Asia effectively went under.

Jones Holding Capital Structure and the Insider DIP

The First Day Declaration identifies Josh Jones and his entities, primarily Jones Holding LLC, as the dominant secured-creditor group. The declaration says the debt originally owed to NFS Capital on three Boeing 757s and four engines stood at about $22.4 million as of January 16, 2026, that Jones Holding had acquired those NFS rights, and that separate Jones Holding secured promissory notes totaled $11,327,786.69 as of the petition date — bringing Jones's secured position to roughly $33.7 million. That secured claim was later fixed for plan-voting purposes at $29,300,681.00 as Class 3.

On the unsecured side, management said the estates owed more than $10 million to non-insider general unsecured creditors, while Jones or his family trusts held nearly $22 million of New Pacific convertible notes on an unsecured basis. The declaration adds that Jones had forgiven more than $50 million of secured and unsecured New Pacific debt as of December 31, 2024. The New Pacific schedules filed in February 2026 listed total nonpriority unsecured claims against the carrier of approximately $87.4 million.

The debtors' financing package gave Jones Holding a senior secured superpriority postpetition facility. The Final DIP Order approved delayed-draw term loans up to the lesser of $3,330,000 and the amounts permitted under the approved budget, plus a cashless roll-up of prepetition secured debt into postpetition obligations on entry of the final order. All seven debtors are borrowers and FLOAT Alaska Real Estate LLC is a guarantor; DIP commitment fees and interest were assumed to be paid in kind until maturity, with priming liens and superpriority claims subject to a professional-fee carve-out.

Sale proceeds began paying that balance down as soon as assets closed. The FLOAT Alaska LLC May 2026 monthly operating report shows about $1.99 million of combined net proceeds from the AMTRA and Wexford aircraft-parts sales applied against the DIP loan, and about $3.8 million of net proceeds from the Elevate Aviation Group sale applied against the Jones Holding NFS secured note; the outstanding DIP balance itself comprised the $3.33 million cashless roll-up plus $83,250 in commitment fees and paid-in-kind interest. The parent entity's standalone cash balance stood at $75,000 at month-end, with a $52,799 net loss driven mostly by $51,799 of interest expense.

The unsecured-creditors committee objected that the structure shifted value to an insider on a compressed timetable. The committee objection argued the transaction should be judged under the entire-fairness standard because Jones was simultaneously an insider, prepetition lender, equity holder, and proposed DIP lender, and that the original collateral package improperly reached assets unsecured creditors would otherwise look to — the Part 121 certificate, np.com, tax refunds, insurance proceeds, commercial tort claims, and avoidance actions.

That fight was resolved through a negotiated settlement embedded in the final order, carried into the plan as the "Committee DIP Resolution." The certification of counsel describes its terms: an additional $100,000 funding component for committee professional fees; exclusion of the np.com domain from DIP collateral; preservation of avoidance actions for the estates; the first up to $1.1 million of net domain proceeds to the estates without participation by Jones's prepetition unsecured claims after repaying the $100,000; and a split of avoidance-action proceeds under which the first $300,000 stays with the estates before any excess can be used as a last-resort source to satisfy unpaid DIP claims.

Section 363 Sales and the Aircraft Buyers

The sale process covered far more than the jets. The Sale Motion put substantially all estate assets on the market — three Boeing 757 aircraft, associated parts and tooling, New Pacific's FAA Part 121 air carrier certificate, the np.com domain, the equity in Aleutian Airways LLC, and the New Pacific equity itself — and the bidding-procedures notice framed a marketing process with stalking-horse protections. The Part 121 certificate was the principal intangible asset in the sale: obtaining a new one normally takes up to two years and a multimillion-dollar investment in manuals, training, and FAA safety audits, so a qualified buyer could fold it into a launch or expansion of scheduled operations far faster than starting from scratch. The court approved Sage Popovich, Inc. as sales agent effective as of the petition date, on a commission grid of 3% for aircraft sold with engines, 5% for aircraft sold without engines or for engines alone, 12% for APU or other non-engine parts, and 4% for the Part 121 certificate, with a 50% reduction for purchasers introduced by the debtors.

On March 27, 2026, the court entered an Omnibus Asset Sale Order approving multiple asset purchase agreements with section 363(f) free-and-clear and 363(m) good-faith findings, naming Elevate Aviation Group, LLC, AMTRA Aero Component Solutions, LLC, and Jones Holding LLC among the successful purchasers. The more-than-$20 million sale approval covered aircraft, spare parts, and an affiliate. The sales then closed in tranches. Elevate Aviation Group purchased aircraft N627NP and N628NP plus related parts after a $25,000 purchase-price reduction resolved a dispute over the scope of acquired assets, closing May 11, 2026. Wexford Capital, LP bought the debtors' aircraft parts for $1,000,000 under an order entered April 20, 2026, and that sale closed April 22, 2026. Jones Holding LLC bought FLOAT Alaska's and New Pacific's equity interests in Aleutian Airways, a sale that closed June 18, 2026.

The New Pacific carrier itself was the one asset sold through the plan rather than a standalone closing. Under the confirmed combined plan, Owners Jet was the successful bidder for 100% of the equity in New Pacific Airlines — the entity holding the "Reorganization Assets" — contributing a $3,100,000 Plan Sponsor Contribution. The plan expressly states Owners Jet is not an insider of any debtor, distinguishing the carrier's buyer from Jones. The debtors paired the sales with contract dispositions, including a first omnibus rejection order effective as of the petition date and a second omnibus rejection order entered June 11, 2026, alongside an earlier notice of assumption and cure amounts covering twelve New Pacific contracts.

Combined Plan, Liquidating Trust, and the Exit Note

The Second Amended Combined Disclosure Statement and Chapter 11 Plan was confirmed June 18, 2026 after the court approved the disclosure statement and solicitation procedures on an interim basis in May. On the effective date, the plan vests the Reorganization Assets in Reorganized New Pacific Airlines free and clear, the Plan Sponsor takes 100% of the reorganized equity for its $3.1 million contribution, and Reorganized New Pacific receives a discharge. A Liquidating Trust holds everything else — the np.com domain, the Trust Administration Reserve, retained causes of action, and any other remaining assets — to monetize, object to and settle claims, and distribute to allowed-claim holders.

The plan also resolves how Jones is paid. The Plan Supplement provides that, in exchange for permitting its collateral proceeds to fund administrative expenses exceeding the DIP budget, Jones Holding receives an Exit Note issued by the Liquidating Trust, secured by a first-priority interest in the trust assets (excluding the Trust Administration Reserve) and repaid from the "first dollars" of asset monetization. The Liquidating Trustee may not sell the np.com domain for net proceeds under $300,000 without Jones Holding's prior written consent, leaving the domain, retained causes of action, and avoidance claims as the principal recovery levers for unsecured creditors.

The plan sets out class treatment as follows:

Class	Description	Status	Treatment
1 / 2	Priority and secured claims (non-Jones)	Unimpaired	Deemed to accept; no vote
3	Jones Holding Secured Claim	Impaired	Prepetition Lender Claim Recovery; deficiency treated as Class 6, subject to the Committee DIP Resolution
4	Mechanics' Lienholder Claims	Impaired	Cash equal to allowed secured amount, plus pro rata share of General Unsecured Claim Trust Interests on the unsecured amount
5	Convenience Claims	Impaired	Cash equal to 15% of the allowed claim
6	General Unsecured Claims	Impaired	Pro rata share of General Unsecured Claim Trust Interests, subject to the Committee DIP Resolution
7	Subordinated Claims	Impaired	No distribution
8	Existing Equity Interests	Impaired	Canceled; no distribution
9A / 9B	Intercompany Claims and Interests	Impaired	Adjusted, settled, reinstated, or eliminated; deemed to reject

All four voting classes accepted. The certification of ballots reports Class 3 accepting with a single $29,300,681.00 ballot, Class 4 mechanics' lienholders accepting at $1,362,071.75, Class 5 convenience claims accepting 16 to 1, and Class 6 general unsecured claims accepting 41 to 2 by amount ($44,943,174.18 accepting against $205,245.00 rejecting). An alternative tabulation excluding potential-insider ballots did not change the result for any class.

Creditor Disputes and the Settlement Wave

The most valuable contested claim came from the charter side. Private Jet Services filed Proof of Claim No. 14 for $18,863,022 in breach-of-contract and rejection damages, asserting lost NHL and MLB client agreements, mitigation costs, and willful-breach remedies under a May 25, 2025 charter agreement. The debtors objected to the claim and obtained authority to reject the PJS agreement retroactive to the petition date. On June 22, 2026, the debtors moved to approve a Rule 9019 settlement under which PJS would withdraw its entire $18,863,022 claim with prejudice in exchange for mutual releases — including the debtors' asserted roughly $821,000 in claims against PJS — with no cash paid to PJS. The court approved the settlement on July 10, 2026, and PJS withdrew Proof of Claim No. 14 with prejudice on July 16, 2026, closing out the largest claim against the general-unsecured pool.

A separate global settlement resolved the aircraft-lien fights. Bischoff Aerospace, which had performed AOG maintenance on Boeing 757 tail N628NP, and Associated Energy Group, LLC reached a Rule 9019 settlement with the debtors and the Jones parties, approved June 18, 2026. The order allows Bischoff a $705,000 Class 4 claim and AEG a $657,071.75 Class 4 claim, provides each a $43,750 cash payment from segregated cash collateral, and grants each a participation interest of up to $3.75 million in distributions on the Jones unsecured claim, while dismissing a related adversary proceeding, a Florida action, and Bischoff's stay-relief motion.

A separate lease dispute remained contested as June closed. Juliet Romeo Aviation LLC, which leased a Boeing 757 to New Pacific Airlines, opposed the debtors' objection to its Proof of Claim No. 99 on June 29, 2026. JRV says New Pacific induced it to spend more than $1 million preparing the aircraft for service while knowing the carrier could not perform, then defaulted by ceasing operations and filing chapter 11; JRV wants to keep its $300,000 security deposit and recover its out-of-pocket costs, and argues the debtors' claim objection is unsupported by the governing lease. The dispute remained unresolved in the docket record reviewed.

The plan itself drew a confirmation objection from the U.S. Trustee. The objection argued that the plan's third-party release provision was a non-consensual release using a deemed-consent opt-out mechanism unconfirmable under Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., and that automatic claim-disallowance provisions conflicted with the due-process requirements of 11 U.S.C. § 502. The objection was resolved through plan and confirmation-order revisions, and the entered confirmation order found the Article XI releases consensual.

Owners Jet Funding Delay and Kamboj Backup Bid

Confirmation did not close the case. Owners Jet had not delivered the $3,100,000 Plan Sponsor Contribution required to complete the New Pacific Airlines reorganization by its original deadline, and on June 30, 2026 the debtors filed a motion to modify the confirmed plan and approve a stipulation with the sponsor. The motion raises the contribution to $3,300,000, with a conditional $3,200,000 payment available if Owners Jet funded the original $3.1 million by June 30. Owners Jet separately agreed to a non-refundable $100,000 contribution designated as DIP collateral for administrative expenses, with any unused balance payable to Jones Holding LLC.

The same modification motion built in a fallback buyer. If Owners Jet failed to fund by July 2, 2026, the debtors could substitute Kamboj Ventures Inc. as plan sponsor and back-up bidder by certification of counsel rather than new motion practice, so long as the certification recorded whether the DIP lender, the committee, and the U.S. Trustee consented. Days earlier, the debtors had already pulled their scheduled June 30 final-decree hearing, continuing that motion to a date to be determined rather than closing the six subsidiary cases while the sponsor question remained open.

The dispute reached a hearing on July 2, 2026. The amended hearing agenda and the July 2 hearing record reflect that Owners Jet still had not funded the $3.1 million, with the delay attributed to international wire-transfer and anti-money-laundering holds at a South African bank. The parties reached a further agreement at the hearing: Owners Jet would immediately release a $200,000 non-refundable good-faith deposit from escrow, and the debtors would hold off on further plan-modification or confirmation-order relief until July 8, 2026, giving the sponsor a final window to close.

The court approved that stipulation on July 7, 2026. The entered order raised the Plan Sponsor Contribution to $3,300,000, required Owners Jet to release the $200,000 non-refundable escrow deposit to the debtors, and preserved the certification-of-counsel mechanism to substitute Kamboj Ventures as plan sponsor and back-up bidder if Owners Jet still had not funded by July 8, 2026. As of the docket reviewed through July 17, 2026, no certification substituting Kamboj had been filed, though the record does not separately confirm that Owners Jet completed the funding or that the plan's Effective Date had occurred.

Saul Ewing, Sherwood, and Committee Counsel

The debtors retained Saul Ewing LLP as bankruptcy counsel, with the retention order approving the engagement effective as of the petition date and the Zev M. Shechtman team leading the case. Sherwood Partners Inc. served as financial advisor, Sage Popovich as sales agent, and Stretto as claims and noticing agent under an order appointing it early in the case. The court set monthly and quarterly fee mechanics through an interim compensation order entered March 3, 2026, with an 80% fees / 100% expenses monthly draw and a 20% holdback released on quarterly allowance.

The committee retained Lowenstein Sandler LLP as lead counsel and Morris James LLP as Delaware co-counsel, both effective February 11, 2026. By omnibus order, the court approved first interim fees of $261,385.25 plus $3,994.25 in expenses for Lowenstein Sandler and $52,965.00 plus $942.34 in expenses for Morris James, covering the February 11 through April 30, 2026 period. With the sales closed, the debtors moved on June 9, 2026 for a final decree closing six of the seven cases and keeping FLOAT Alaska LLC open as the surviving case to administer residual claims and contested matters; the debtors later cancelled the scheduled June 30 hearing and continued the motion to a date to be determined once the Owners Jet funding dispute emerged.

Key Timeline

Date	Event
January 26, 2026	Petition date; First Day Declaration filed
January 28, 2026	Interim DIP order entered; sale motion filed
February 11, 2026	Official unsecured-creditors committee appointed
February 25, 2026	Final DIP order and bidding-procedures order entered
March 5, 2026	Bar date order entered
March 27, 2026	Omnibus Asset Sale Order entered (Elevate, AMTRA, Jones Holding)
April 22, 2026	Wexford aircraft-parts sale ($1.0M) closed
May 11, 2026	Elevate Aviation Group aircraft sale (N627NP, N628NP) closed
June 18, 2026	Plan confirmed; AEG/Bischoff settlement approved; Aleutian equity sale closed
June 22, 2026	PJS settlement motion filed (claim withdrawal)
June 24, 2026	Debtors cancel June 30 final-decree hearing, continue motion to a TBD date
June 29, 2026	Juliet Romeo Aviation opposes claim objection over Boeing 757 lease
June 30, 2026	Debtors move to modify plan; raise Owners Jet contribution and add Kamboj backup-bidder path
July 2, 2026	Funding-dispute hearing; Owners Jet agrees to release $200,000 escrow deposit, given until July 8 to close
July 7, 2026	Court approves modified stipulation; Owners Jet contribution raised to $3.3 million; Kamboj back-up path preserved if unfunded by July 8
July 10, 2026	Court approves PJS Rule 9019 settlement
July 16, 2026	PJS withdraws Proof of Claim No. 14 with prejudice

Frequently Asked Questions

When did FLOAT Alaska file chapter 11, and what happened to the case? The debtors filed on January 26, 2026 in the District of Delaware under lead case number 26-10075, after operations had already shut down. The court confirmed a combined plan on June 18, 2026 that reorganizes New Pacific Airlines under an outside sponsor and liquidates the remaining estates through a Liquidating Trust. Plan sponsor Owners Jet missed its original funding deadline, and the court approved a revised stipulation on July 7, 2026 that raised the contribution to $3.3 million and gave the sponsor until July 8, 2026 to close before a back-up bidder could be substituted; the docket reviewed through July 17, 2026 shows no such substitution.

Why did the company file after shutting down operations? The debtors describe a layered collapse: the transpacific model was undercut by Russian airspace restrictions, FlyCoin lost momentum in the 2022 crypto crash, Ravn faced pilot shortages and route retrenchment, and New Pacific lost liquidity after its charter business failed in late 2025.

Who financed the chapter 11 case? Jones Holding LLC, the insider entity tied to Josh Jones, financed the case through a superpriority DIP facility capped at $3.33 million under the Final DIP Order. A negotiated committee settlement excluded the np.com domain from DIP collateral, preserved avoidance actions, and added $100,000 of committee funding.

Who bought the assets? Elevate Aviation Group bought two Boeing 757s, Wexford Capital bought aircraft parts for $1,000,000, and Jones Holding bought the Aleutian Airways equity, all under the Omnibus Asset Sale Order and later closings. New Pacific Airlines itself was sold through the plan to Owners Jet for a $3.1 million Plan Sponsor Contribution, later raised to $3.3 million in the July 2026 modification.

What do creditors recover under the plan? Convenience-class creditors receive 15% in cash, and general unsecured creditors share pro rata in General Unsecured Claim Trust Interests funded by the Liquidating Trust, while subordinated claims and existing equity receive nothing, per the confirmed plan. PJS's July 2026 withdrawal of its $18.86 million claim removed the largest claim from that unsecured pool, though the docket does not quantify a resulting recovery percentage, and the general-unsecured recovery still depends on trust monetization of the np.com domain and retained causes of action.

Who is the claims agent in the FLOAT Alaska bankruptcy? Stretto, Inc. is the claims and noticing agent. The order appointing Stretto authorized it to maintain the claims register and handle noticing for the seven jointly administered debtors.

For related coverage, see ElevenFlo's reporting on the Silver Airways zero-bid sale and chapter 7 conversion, Azul's confirmed airline restructuring, Spirit Airlines' second chapter 11, and the Silvergate Capital crypto-bank liquidation.