Global air finance titans ponder whether boom will ever end

As the titans of the $140b a year aircraft financing industry gathered in Dublin this week to celebrate an unprecedented boom, a few were casting a cold eye on mistakes of the past - and whether they could happen again. Ireland owes its dominance of global aircraft finance to the rise and spectacular collapse in 1992 of industry pioneer Guinness Peat Aviation (GPA), which demonstrated both the risks and returns possible from financing airplanes. The former GPA executives who now dominate the industry were debating which of the new players and investors that have flooded in the last five years might not have learned from those mistakes - and whether the industry had finally broken its cycle of spectacular booms and busts. The five-star venues that every year host the sector’s showcase conferences were heaving with hundreds of new investors - many from China - who have poured in to a once-obscure industry as global investors engage in a desperate search for returns. Throngs of financiers spilled into the street from the 200-year-old Shelbourne Hotel during the Airline Economics conference, whose delegate list has tripled to 3,000 in five years. “Sentiment is as positive as I have seen it,” Alec Burger the head of No. 2 lessor GECAS - formed from the hulk of GPA - told a packed second conference, Global Airfinance, where airline executives buoyed by surging air traffic eyed funds to expand their fleets. “This will be the fourth year of global airline profits above $30b and that is beyond unprecedented,” Flight Ascend chief economist Peter Morris said. Story has more details.<br/>