Fractional ownership operators will soon benefit from the lower financing costs open to airlines, lessors and finance providers operating in countries that have signed up to the Cape Town convention and aircraft protocol.
The International Civil Aviation Organisation's International Registry of Mobile Assets database, which began operating when the convention came into force on 1 March last year, is set to open up to include fractional ownership assets too, according to Niall Greene, managing director of Aviareto, the joint venture between the Irish government and Sita that runs the electronic database. Registering assets on the database makes them more easily recoverable, leading to increased security for lenders and owners and lower exposure fees for operators.
Greene says the system for including fractional ownership has already been developed and tests lasting several weeks were set to begin on 23 April. The system is expected to be rolled out "towards the end of May", he adds. Aviareto plans to hold a seminar in Oklahoma City on 14 May to explain the system to potential users, but Greene adds that "many of these have been intimately involved" in setting it up.
Aviareto has, meanwhile, released statistics from the database's first year of operation. At the end of February it contained around 250,000 serial numbers of aircraft engines, fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters from 35 manufacturers, and interests have been registered against around 18,000 of these so far.
The European Union is on track to ratify the treaty and Lorne Clark, who took part in the negotiations leading to the adoption of the Cape Town convention, is confident several growing aviation markets including China, India and Russia will ratify the treaty soon.
Source: Flight International