About

Thomas Schmid, director and general counsel at Horizon Aerospace has been involved in aviation legal work for over 20 years. This covers private practice as well as in-house roles in the fields of aviation insurance, airlines and tour operators, aircraft leasing and commercial aviation consulting. He started his current role in autumn 2018 after five years at Intrepid Aviation, where he was the managing director of the Irish business and general counsel. He also spent seven years at CIT Aerospace, where he held the role of chief counsel and managed a team of lawyers, based in both Dublin and Singapore. Highly experienced at creating and developing in-house legal teams and cultures Schmid has applied his knowledge to his role at Horizon Aerospace. While the general counsel of Intrepid Aviation he was appointed managing director of the Irish operation due to his management aptitude, as well as setting up its Dublin office from scratch. Additionally, while at CIT Aerospace, he made significant changes to its working processes. He identifies that, ‘rather than outsourcing transactional legal work, [he] put together a business plan, which would double the size of the legal team, but would see aircraft lease transactions supported by the internal team, rather than outside law firms. After this was implemented, there was an annual saving to the business of around US$1.5m and importantly, the average transaction time to having an executed agreement dropped from around 90 days to 40 days’. Recently his most important transaction was the negotiating and supporting all elements of a transaction with a Turkish airline for the lease of seven A330 aircraft. He describes it as ‘challenging, as the airline was aware that we had a lack of alternative options for the aircraft and negotiated very hard. At the same time we needed to stand our ground, so that the economics of the transaction were not eroded too much, against a background, where the deal falling through, could have had serious consequences for the business’.