If the plane does not continue to be used at least 50 percent of the time for business, the owner may be subject to depreciation recapture before it is sold.
Aside from benefiting business owners and family offices with the means to buy planes, the loophole also offers an advantage to recreational pilots who rent by the hour by providing new, safe planes to fly.
The actor Anthony Edwards, who played Goose to Tom Cruise’s Maverick in the 1986 action movie “Top Gun,” learned to fly a plane in 2011, 25 years after the film made Navy fighter pilots cool.
“I am the guy who comes in and rents and makes it possible for others to buy planes,” said Mr. Edwards, who takes lessons at Performance Flight. “What impresses me is, there are new planes coming in, and as a pilot, you get to experience state of the art.”
Rentals start at $400 an hour, not cheap, but a far cry from the cost of buying a plane.
But as enticing the tax deduction is for some enthusiasts, others balk at the I.R.S. restrictions. Dr. Randall V. Ehrlich, an orthopedic surgeon who lives in Greenwich, Conn, and has three offices around New York, decided not to use the bonus depreciation incentive. He said he could fly to two of his offices more quickly than driving, but he did not like the constraints imposed by the deduction or the lease-back structure.
“I might get out of the office early and might want to go fly. If the plane is being used by someone else, that would make me very unhappy,” Dr. Ehrlich said. “Or spur of the moment, we might fly down to Philadelphia for the afternoon. You lose some of the fun.”
Even without the lease-back component, the tax deduction could still have allowed him to write off the full value of his plane, which cost about $800,000, if he used it just for business in the first year. But the I.R.S. rules are meant for pieces of equipment with a strict business use, not a Saturday jaunt to grab lunch.
But following the rules can provide an extra perk: rental income from the fight schools.
“I normally wouldn’t have bought a new plane,” Mr. Siegel said. “I’d buy a used plane, but now, with a new plane, there’s significant income each month.”
