George B
Extinct but not forgotten Staff Member
Essentially George a leasing company which is basically a bank will agree a negotiated price for lets say 6 of the latest generation 747 with Boeing Company and a big announcement will be made at the Paris or Farnborough Air Show.
The leasing company will in turn have airline customers throughout the world and so the aircraft hull only will be leased to British Airways in our example for perhaps 300,000USD per month.
Then you need to consider maintenance and so the cost of tooling up and keeping spare engines, staff training specialist equipment all costs mouthwatering sums of money. Therefore in our example British Airways who partner with Rolls Royce will insist that the new aircraft is fitted with RR engines.
Four of the latest Trent engines will be shipped to Boeing and fitted onto the Jumbo. Rolls Royce will charge British Airways 100 USD per engine per operating hour in what is called “Power by the Hour” Depending on the deal that might be as much as 150,000 USD per month.
Finally British Airways will say we want a Honeywell Avionics package installed in the cockpit and that might come to 70,000USD per month.
Therefore at least three different banks will be involved in the deal. The banks may in turn sell or spread the risk of this investment by involving other banks.
So its a complicated deal involving huge sums of money. The banks in turn will want to have confidence in who is going to be operating the aircraft that they have a major stake in and so you can see that some serious due diligence will be conducted.
British Airways will never own the engines they just rent them by the hour. Rolls Royce are responsible for all major overhaul and so they keep constant around the clock watch on the health and operating performance of the engines installed on all BA aircraft. Basically an on-board computer system records the key operating parameters and performance of the engine. Once the aircraft is airborne every 15 minutes data is transferred via an uplink to a satellite and a downlink to Rolls Royce in Derby England where its evaluated by a local engineer who may be monitoring hundreds of engines at any one time.
Ok . . . so you are saying no one buys 747s or other heavy lift aircraft out right . . . if one wanted to remain below the radar they would purchase a few each year through different front corporations and then re-sell it to another . . . eventually, they could control the use of 9 to 24 heavy lift aircraft under several different paper owners . . . you think the black operations people cannot launder funds and purchase and operate almost anything on the sly . . . ?