Aircraft lessors face uphill battle to return assets recovered from Russia to skies

Aircraft leasing companies have launched a multinational effort to persuade safety authorities to allow grounded planes that were returned from Russia without full maintenance records back into commercial service. Declan Kelly, chair of Aircraft Leasing Ireland, said the trade body had begun an “asset preservation study” with regulators in Europe, the US and Bermuda to “come up with a mechanism of how to repatriate those aircraft into our global system”. Sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine triggered a global rush among overseas leasing groups to recover more than 500 aircraft worth an estimated $10b that were stuck in the country. Irish aircraft leasing groups are among the worst affected, with planes worth more than $4b leased to Russian airlines. Lessors have been able to recover 41 planes with an estimated market value of $770mn since the start of the conflict, according to estimates by aviation consultancy Cirium. However, Kelly said “many of the aircraft do not have a full suite of maintenance records”. Such records, usually handed back at the end of each lease, are crucial both for validating aircraft value and for obtaining insurance. The Kremlin passed a law last month allowing foreign aircraft leased by its airlines to be added to the country’s domestic register, in effect allowing them to keep flying domestically. Lessors now face the prospect of putting each aircraft through lengthy and expensive maintenance and safety checks to reconstruct its records. Story has more. <br/>