I just had the unpleasant experience of the lessor cancelling 3 leased aircraft after I returned an aircraft, so suddenly I had 3 days to find money to lease 3 other aircraft. This is very hard and will cause disruption in the schedule and I will loose money.
I think that 3 days is too short of a notice to return the aircraft and I think that the team should increase this to either a week or two weeks. Normally when return agreements are made it is not an advantage for the lessor, but the lessee.
Some of those aircraft have been leased close to a year and I am now in the process of renewing my fleet and therefore some of the planes will slowy return to lessor. I don’t see anywhere where it says that you leased out long term only and I had to inform you. Instead of being childish and cancel all you could just have asked. Also now you have 4 planes on your hand that you have to find new homes for instead of only one a week.
I suggest that AS team makes a function to alter contracts for leases, so we can avoid issues like this in the future.
Honestly, on tempelhof I used my holding company to lease out planes.
I find it more profitable to have a pre-signed contract enabled. The reasoning is that most of the contracts I offer are either canceled (lack of payment) or the airlines are deleted. I make more money with these because if the client cancels the contract, I still get the money for the whole week. If the company goes outta business, I still get money based on how many days the plane was in there possession. All in all I still get paid. Although long term partners are ideal since you don’t have a spam of emails from bankrupt companies, but I think it still makes more money in the long run. In my hayday I had over 50 planes inventoried and more than 75% of them were leased out consistently.
I have had long term partners, and yes they have returned the planes with and without an explanation. But in the end the planes stay on the market and I still get paid. Also something to note, when a server starts. The cheap planes (727’s, 737-200 and -300’s) are bought up quick (either leased out or used) but eventually after a server becomes established those planes will be available to the market freely for the most part. I say this because I started leasing on tempelhof by buying these cheap planes. But I found after some time no one wanted to lease them, and those that did would just terminate them or go out of business. I currently offer better 737’s and now because I would simply sell the planes back to AS that were not leased consistently and buy better ones. The way I looked at it, if you buy older aircraft (an aircraft that is reaching it’s ~20 year mark that has fully depreciated) and you lease it out at lease for 3 full weeks (you have to subtract 2 weeks for when it is on sale to AS because it takes that long for the server to buy it back from you), you have made a profit (minus staffing expenses of course).
