Well I sort of found a solution. Since I did not want a basemap and wanted all layers to be operational, I created a service called blank and cached it (.jpg) at one scale (1:120000). There are only two tiles that are completely white. I added a new basemap and pointed it to the REST URL. Within the application, I changed the base map from the air photo to the blank base map and removed it from the table of contents. I then added the air photo as a operational layer (cached at 9 scales), so our users can turn it on and off. This seems to be working really well.