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OK ther's only 4800 shares for sale now up to
QUESTION:Airliner storage facilities in the Arizona desert are being inundated
with calls from airlines wanting berths to park their unwanted jumbos.
In some cases even 'white tails' - new aircraft without a mile under the
belt - are heading straight for the desert. Evergreen Air Center near
Tucson, the world's biggest airliner storage facility, is gearing* up
for a 65% increase in business.
...
But the damage goes much further than this. Thousands of planes are
owned not by airlines, but by banks, leasing companies and special
purpose investment vehicles put together in happier times.
...
The biggest aircraft owners are General Electric's financial powerhouse
GE Capital; ILFC, part of American International Group, and Boullioun
Aviation Services, owned by WestLB. GE Capital alone owns 1,100 planes
and is thought to be locked into many forward purchases with the big
aircraft manufacturers.
...
GE Capital's leasing arm GECAS promises potential airline customers
'100% financing with no need for pre-delivery payments or significant
downpayments.' GECAS did a fresh leasing deal with Swissair just weeks
before it announced plans to file for bankruptcy.
Another casualty are so-called Aircraft Asset-Backed Securitisations -
special investment vehicles which each own anything between 11 and 200
passenger aircraft. Insurance companies and pension funds own tens of
billions of dollars of bonds* in these vehicles.
...
Some CDOs - collateralised debt obligations - have more than 10% of
their assets secured against aircraft. As the airline industry crisis
deepens, the City is now starting to ask who precisely owns the rapidly
depreciating assets above our heads".
(http://www.thisismoney.com/20011017/nm39105.html)
ANSWER: California No better barometer of the fortunes of the airline
industry exists than 1,200 acres (486 hectares) of parched brown earth
here, baking under the desert sun. Jetliners, row upon row of them, sit
idle in three lots, their engines sealed with silver or black plastic
Mylar, their tails rising from the flat desert like shark fins.
Rattlesnakes slither in the shadows of nose cones and tortoises inch
their way past landing gear. A yellow school bus carrying a dozen
mechanics barrels among the planes, kicking up dust.
About 250 jets have been consigned to this purgatory, a storage and
maintenance yard operated by Avtel Services Inc. That number is four
times as large as before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. When the
airline business is lousy, the money here can be good, and the general
manager, Justin Loucks, says it will only get better. 'I don't think
we've seen the end of the bankruptcies in the U.S.', Loucks said as he
stared out the window of his second-floor office at the field of planes.
'Several companies are on the brink'.
Avtel has 50 customers from around the world, and many have parked their
multimillion-dollar assets in Loucks's scorching front yard. There are
silver Fokker 100s from American Airlines, cherry-red Boeing 737-200s
from US Airways' failed Metrojet venture and hulking blue 747s from KLM,
the Dutch airline. About 70 percent of the planes are from lessors and
the leasing arms of companies like Bank of America and General Electric
Co., the rest from the carriers themselves...
...The airpark here is the largest of five, all owned by different
companies and scattered across Southern California, Arizona and New
Mexico, according to Back Aviation Solutions, an airline consulting
firm. The second-largest, in Victorville, California, had 168 planes as
of May 22, up from 77 before the Sept. 11 attacks. The third-largest, in
Roswell, New Mexico, had 145 aircraft, up from 16.
Airlines have been mothballing jets to reduce an oversupply of seats.
Available seat miles among major airlines, a measure of capacity, were
down 6.5 percent in April from the same month last year, and down nearly
twice that much in May, according to the Air Transport Association, the
main industry trade group.
Here in Mojave, the number of planes reached a peak of 310 last August,
Loucks said. It has dropped by about 20 percent since then, but not
because the big U.S. airlines are returning their jets to service.
Generally, the aircraft - many of them 25 years old - are being sold to
airlines in developing countries".
(http://www.iht.com/articles/98923.html)
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