Скачать или смотреть Aircraft Leasing 101: An Introduction; Aviation Aircraft Backed Securities (AABS's)

The odds that American Airlines actually owns the plane are only a little better than a coin flip.
As of the company’s ​latest annual report​, American Airlines has a total of 965 planes in its mainline fleet. Of these, just 495 are owned — with the remaining 470 leased from another company.
That near 50-50 lease ratio is in line with the industry average. 53% of all commercial aircrafts in operation today are leased.
Considering the scale of the airline market, aircraft leasing is clearly a massive industry. But with most people only paying attention to the airlines, or the manufacturing duopoly of Boeing and Airbus, leasing tends to "fly under the radar."
Today, we’ll explore:
How aircraft leasing actually works in practice
The economic incentives causing airlines to lease a greater portion of their fleet
The two ways to invest in aircraft leasing
How does aircraft leasing work?
In theory, aircraft leasing is a simple 4-step process:
An aircraft lessor goes to a manufacturer (basically either Boeing or Airbus) and orders a plane.
The manufacturer delivers the aircraft, and the lessor pays the the manufacturer (typically financed by a bank loan or investor loan).
The lessor leases their new plane to an airline (like American Airlines) who operates it for a fixed number of years — effectively renting out the aircraft in exchange for regular payments.
When the lease is finished, the airline returns the plane to the lessor, who rents it out again if it’s still in operable condition. If not, it gets scrapped.
Well, as you may guess, aircraft leasing gets a lot more complicated in practice. And that's where the investment opportunities come in.
The sale & leaseback model
While the basic model is a useful first pass, there are big facts about the market it can’t explain.
For example, despite owning 53% of all airplanes, lessors account for just 23% of new airplane manufacturing orders.
Where are lessors getting their planes from?
Well, lessors can order planes from manufacturers. But that’s not always the case.
Instead, the airline itself often buys the plane, financing it through cash or capital markets, and then sells the plane to the lessor, who turns around and leases it right back to the airline!
This bizarre technique is known as the sale & leaseback model, and it's quite common!
In 2022, the sale & leaseback technique was responsible for ​18% of all Boeing deliveries​ — compared with 13% by direct lessor purchases and 69% by direct airline purchases.
But wait, if an airline is planning to lease an aircraft anyways, why not just let the lessor buy it? Why would you buy it yourself first and jump through all these hoops?
A few reasons:
In a sale & leaseback, airlines can dictate specifications to the manufacturer, giving them greater control over the plane they’ll be flying.
The lessor might be able to achieve lower financing rates from the reduced risk of having a lease transaction embedded with the aircraft purchase, translating into better lease rates for the airline.
Airlines can usually ​profit​ from buying low and selling high, as they get manufacturer discounts that lessors can’t access.
Sale & leaseback arbitrage can be a sizable business for airlines. Frontier made a cool ​$147 million​ in gains doing this in 2023 (but still posted a net loss of $11m).
Dry and wet leases
In Steps 3 and 4 above, I described how airlines “rent” planes before returning them. But this isn’t always how it works.
Traditional aircraft leases are known as dry leases. With a dry lease, an airline is responsible for providing crew, maintenance, fuel, and exerting operational control over flights.
But there are also wet leases, also known as ACMI (aircraft, crew, maintenance, and insurance) leases.
Under this lease agreement, the lessor is responsible for operational control over the flight, not the leasing airline. (Think of it like chartering an airline, or subcontracting a route.)
Wet leases are far more popular in Europe, where they’re used to meet short-term high demand during the summer (although some argue this is really about ​skirting EU labor laws​).
US airlines have fewer wet leases thanks to ​union agreements​ that limit the number of flights that can be outsourced to non-airline pilots.
While typical dry lease agreements can be for 10+ years, wet leases are far shorter, from two years to just a few months.