Spotlight
How we invest
Aviation is cyclical, and we invest ahead of it. We aim to anticipate its turns to capture the best value for our investors: holding aircraft for contracted income, and acting when pricing, airlines or markets create opportunity. Three investments show what that means in practice.
Entry and exit
A portfolio of ten narrowbody aircraft, leased to an established European carrier, was acquired at attractive entry prices and with solid income expectations. Through market insight, we recognized early from other carriers’ fleet planning that demand for this aircraft type was building while new deliveries were scarce. We positioned the portfolio for sale directly to those carriers. Within two years we sold it ahead of plan, realizing the value of a rising market for our investors.
Management
When the Covid pandemic grounded fleets worldwide, a normally liquid market dried up almost overnight. We worked through the crisis with every carrier operating our aircraft: staying in constant contact with those still paying, agreeing emergency measures with those who could not, up to and including bankruptcy restructurings. And because we stay close to our aircraft, their records and the airlines that fly them, we could act when it mattered: when one carrier operating three of our aircraft ran into serious difficulties, the aircraft were placed with another carrier within a short period. Through the crisis, we preserved our investors’ capital and delivered results close to plan.
Opportunity
An airline with a stalled long-haul expansion and more widebody orders than it could use. Two things made the aircraft hard to sell: a location in a jurisdiction from which moving an asset at short notice is difficult, and a single widebody rarely fits the fleet plans of large carriers with order books of their own. Through our network we found a smaller carrier with a real need for one aircraft of this type and little access to it. We acquired the aircraft at an attractive price, orchestrated its transfer out of the jurisdiction and into the new lease, and turned it into a stable investment, which we realized ahead of plan after a short holding period.
