No Friends Like Old Friends

Those outside the industry may wonder at Ireland's long -established and much-cherished position as one of the places – if not the place – to base an aircraft leasing business. Ireland, specifically Shannon but more recently to a greater extent Dublin, boasts some impressive numbers; somewhere in the region of 3,500 commercial aircraft are managed from Ireland, amounting to roughly one in five of the global fleet and half of all leased aircraft worldwide. The value of those aircraft is put at more than euro 80 billion and the industry provides roughly 1,000 Irish jobs directly, many of them the kind of highly skilled, well paid jobs that governments, everywhere crave.

This pre-eminence is attributed to one man, the late Dr. Tony Ryan, who founded Guinness Peat Aviation (GPA) in Shannon in 1975. GPA is credited with pioneering the aircraft leasing model and although GPA's planned floatation failed spectacularly in 1992, the people and skills linked to GPA went on to