Frameworks
Reusable mental models and case studies built on the same data as the rest of this platform, plus reference primers on aircraft financing structures — real numbers where they exist, clear explanation where they don't.
Financing primers
Background on how aircraft, airport, and airline financing structures actually work — supplemental reference for modeling assumptions, not analysis of this platform's own ingested data.
Airport Municipal Bonds
How U.S. airports actually pay for terminals and runways — and why a bond backed by one airline's lease payments prices very differently from one backed by the whole airport's revenue.
Financing PrimerFrench Leveraged Leasing (Crédit-Bail)
A tax-driven structure where French investors monetize accelerated depreciation on an aircraft they'll never fly, and pass part of the savings through to the airline as a cheaper lease.
Financing PrimerJOLCO: Japanese Operating Lease with Call Option
The most widely-used tax-equity aircraft financing structure in the world today — Japanese investors take the depreciation, the airline gets a below-market lease with an option to buy.
Financing PrimerExport Credit Loans (ECA-Backed Aircraft Financing)
When a government export credit agency guarantees an airline's aircraft loan to support its own country's manufacturer — and why the rules exist to keep Airbus and Boeing on a level playing field.
Financing PrimerA/B Loan Structures for Optimizing Cost of Capital
How a development finance institution's preferred-creditor status lets it pull private commercial lenders into a deal at a better rate than they'd offer alone.
Financing PrimerAircraft ABS Primer
How a lessor turns a diversified pool of aircraft leases into rated capital-markets notes — and why that's a different animal from a single-airline EETC.
Financing PrimerEETC Primer
Why an airline with a junk credit rating can still issue investment-grade aircraft debt — the structure, not the airline, is what gets rated.
Financing PrimerOperating Lease
The lessor keeps the aircraft, the residual value risk, and (mostly) the balance-sheet debt — the airline just pays to fly it. What changed when lease accounting rules caught up.
Financing PrimerFinancial Lease
When a lease is really just financed ownership by another name — the aircraft, and the debt, both land on the airline's own balance sheet.
Financing PrimerPBH Lease & Dry Lease
Two genuinely different things that get mentioned in the same breath — one is an aircraft lease, the other is an engine maintenance contract.
Financing PrimerACMI & Wet Lease
Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance, Insurance — all in, flown under someone else's operating certificate, priced by the block hour.
Financing PrimerU.S. Tax Lease (True Lease)
The domestic ancestor of the JOLCO and French lease — and the IRS test that decides whether a 'lease' is real enough for the lessor to claim the depreciation.
Financing PrimerGovernment Loan Guarantee Programs
When Washington backstops an airline's own commercial borrowing directly, for the airline's survival — not, like an ECA guarantee, to support a manufacturer's export sale.
Financing PrimerAircraft Mortgage (Secured Term Loan)
No lessor, no trust, no tax angle — just a bank loan secured directly by the aircraft, amortizing like a mortgage, with the airline owning the asset from day one.