"lessor" is a correct and usable word in written English
You can use it when referring to someone who owns or leases something, typically real estate or a vehicle, to another party. For example: "The lessor provided a list of maintenance responsibilities to the tenant before signing the lease agreement."
Deals in which airlines sell part of their existing fleet to a lessor and rent it back are becoming more common: Air France-KLM wants to do this with planes worth a total of €700m ($897m).RBS Aviation's boss, Peter Barrett, notes that aviation is becoming more like the hotel business: one type of firm specialises in owning the assets, while another operates them.
Bank of China bought a Singaporean lessor just before the financial crisis and it is now in the world's top ten.
"No organisation envelops airlines quite like GE," wrote Robert Ashcroft, an analyst at UBS, in a recent research note.Moreover, GE is the leading lessor within America.
The venture will spend more than $5 billion on new container ships and work with Seaspan, an independent lessor, to lease the vessels to Chinese companies.
But neither lessor nor lessee is willing to invest.
Alafco, a Kuwaiti lessor, splashed out $4.6 billion (at list prices) on 50 Airbus A320neos in November.In this section What next for the start-up nation?
Paul Sheridan of Ascend, an aviation consultancy, reckons that of the world's top four owners of airliners, two are lessors: GECAS, with 1,732 planes, and ILFC, with 1,031, soar miles above Delta (800) and American Airlines (775).
A special provision of Chapter 11 gives aircraft lessors a privileged position over other creditors: they can re-possess aircraft if an airline cannot pay its outstanding lease charges within 60 days.With air travel and airline profits recovering outside America, GE may be able to ease its troubles by placing some of its now unwanted Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s elsewhere, particularly Asia.
With a fleet soon to reach 300, it is one of the world's biggest lessors of aircraft.Airbus said that 2011 had been its most successful year yet, as it delivered 534 aircraft to airlines and booked 1,419 net orders (new minus cancelled).
The healthy low-cost airlines have no interest in assuming the legacy business model of the hub-and-spoke carriers.Hence the miserable stalemate in which lessors and banks prop up ailing carriers in or near Chapter 11, while armies of lawyers and consultants earn huge fees working on rescue plans that never succeed.
The government could have stepped in later to allow only those airlines with credible business plans to fly again.Lessor of two evils?Arguably, however, the most significant change in the industry since the early 1990s has been the growing role of aircraft lessors.
