This podcast marks the 5th episode of Flightpath with Alok. Today, we hear from Enda Swan, Head of Technical with one of the world's largest aircraft leasing companies, Avolon. Enda has invested more than twenty years building a holistic career, which includes airline, MRO, and aircraft leasing platform knowledge, experience and expertise. As Avolon’s Head of Technical, Enda is responsible for oversight of all aspects of building new aircraft, transitioning aircraft from operator to operator, managing AOG, cargo conversion programs, as well as all material supply needed to support the Avolon operation. Enda speaks to Alok about the early years and what it was like growing up on a farm in rural Ireland; how someone with no exposure to air travel or aviation found their way into the industry, and the unlikely event that started the ball rolling. For those young professionals that may have a natural aptitude or leaning towards engineering, Enda’s experience certainly illustrates a great example of how one can find a fun and exciting career in the aircraft leasing sector; one which offers the next generation of young executives the purpose and fulfilment they seek.

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Transcript:

Alok:This episode you are about to hear or watch, for me personally it is special, because my own background is aircraft engineering. And the gentleman who I’m interviewing today, he is from a technical engineering background himself. So I am going enjoy this podcast. I am going to really have fun while asking questions and learning, and I hope you have fun too, thank you! Enda, thankyou for joining me for this episode five of my podcast Flight Path with Alok. It's a pleasure to have you. All the way joining me from Dublin. I'm recording you from Bangalore right now and you know to start with straight up maybe an intro about yourself.

Enda Swan: Absolutely. Sure. Look, and look, it's a great pleasure to be able to join you on this podcast. I've been listening to the past episodes. I've enjoyed them all tremendously. Some ex bosses along the way. So, yeah, I'm Head of Technical in Avolon now. So it's a role that I'm very proud of at the moment. And I've been working in this role since October last year. But to give you a bit of background and tell you about how I started career, where I came from. So I guess starting way back to when I was a child, I grew up in rural Ireland. Again, very, very agricultural, heavy teamed upbringing. So I worked most of my childhood and most of my teenage summers on farms. And I guess it was there while I really, I really learned to be hands on with everything I could be. I loved getting down and dirty with everything, trying to fix machines, loved trying to figure out how a machine worked, an operating machine. So I really had a fondness for engineering and how everything came together to work. So oddly enough, I didn't have any exposure to aviation at all as a child. The family I grew up in, again, agricultural background, we didn’t, we never really traveled far for family holidays. It was always very local. So I never had any exposure to airports, aircraft, airplanes, anything to do with flying. So my interest in aviation came from a very bizarre place. Back when the first Gulf War kicked off, I was fascinated by the TV coverage of the first Gulf War. I used to sit in the evening time looking at the news reports, watching in amazement watching aircraft carriers, aircraft taking off from aircraft carriers, attack helicopters, all the sort of aviation themed war instruments, I suppose. Which is a terrible thing to say that that's where my interest in aviation came from.
But that's what really awoke my sort of attention to aviation. As it sort of progressed then, I do know the closest I ever got to aircraft was really just sitting at home and looking up at the sky and see contrails going over my head and just wondering, you know, trying to figure out because I did have a love for geography as well. So I'd always try to figure out where was north and where was east, where was west, where was an aircraft coming from, where was it going, who was on that aircraft? I was just fascinated by it. But, again, I had no exposure to it. So it was just a sort of a desire that I had to get into it, but I had no real clear idea how I was going to get into aviation. I worked very hard in school. I was a good student, I wanted to get ahead in life. So I wanted to, I knew that I wouldn't have a really good career in my locality, in agricultural background or in any other roles that really were available in the countryside where I was born. So I knew I had to work hard in school to get to university and make a career for myself. Engineering was always going to be the direction of travel for me. And as I progressed through school, my choices were always sort of civil engineer, mechanical engineer themed. And as I was approaching my final exams in my school, and in Ireland, the final exams, you're sort of rewarded with points for, with how good you do for those exams. And all of your points add up to a total. And that's what sort of gets you into the courses that you apply for in the universities. So all of my top 10 courses would have been, as I said, engineering courses. But we had an absent teacher one day. So we had a free class in school and the career guidance teacher was actually looking after us. And, I was talking to him during the class and I told him about how I was interested in aviation. And he told me about this new course in the University of Limerick called aeronautical engineering. It was about three or four years old at that stage. And that I should look into it. So I did. I looked into it. The points were a little bit stretchy for me. I thought I'd be under a little bit of pressure to make those points to qualify for that course. But I put it number one on my list. And as I said, worked and worked and worked my socks off. And managed to get the point. So I was lucky enough, I qualified and got a place at the University of Limerick.
But I nearly didn't make it there because the other side of my aviation desire was to fly aircraft. And that summer between school and university, Aer Lingus had offered up some cadetships for pilots. And there was about 2,000 young boys and girls applied for that year. And I was one of them. I don't very well. I got down to like the last 50 out of 2000. So I don't very well in the process. But when I got to the when I got to the final stages, the last few interviews, my I guess my lack of exposure to commercial aviation, my lack of exposure to travel, my lack of knowledge about Aer Lingus, what type of aircrafts they flew, how aircraft operated sort of was to my detriment. And I didn't get that role. But happy enough, went off to Limerick to start my training as an aeronautical engineer. So that was a four year course in Limerick and part of that course was we had to do cooperative education, which was a nine month placement with an OEM or an MRO or some sort of aviation themed company. And luckily for me, I got a placement in Shannon Aerospace in Shannon, County Clare, Ireland, and I guess like many people who work in aviation in Ireland, for sure, that have come through Shannon, once you once you sort of live and breathe Shannon for a few weeks or a few months, it gets into your system. And that's exactly what happened to me with Shannon, with Shannon Aerospace, with MROs, just being at a live airport, being able to get onto aircraft as I wanted to, being able to watch aircraft take off and land, the smell of jet fuel, it just, you know, it had me at that point. I knew at that point that sort of MRO, maintenance, commercial aircraft was the side of the industry I wanted to get into rather than design engineering or something like that.
So I enjoyed my time in Shannon immensely, but really it was at that point that I really realized what area I wanted to go to when I finished university. A couple of years later, graduated out of university. There's a few very famous people in aircraft leasing that came from my class. I won't mention any names, but we had a good class of about 20 or 25 people that graduated. And luckily for me, I had an offer from FLSA aerospace at Dublin Airport to start a job in their MRO after university. And I was so excited and so anxious to get started that I took two weeks off between university and starting my career. I graduated at the end of May and I was working in Dublin Airport by the middle of June. Took me just two weeks to transition. So into Dublin Airport, again, now I had full on-teddered access to six hangars, to a really busy live international airport, the ramp, the smell of jet fuel, watching passengers, looking at aircraft taking off every day. It was just it was fantastic. It was a dream for me that first job at Dublin Airport. It was a real dream job for me. I began working in the engineering department as a systems engineer. And what FLS Aerospace did was we were a big MRO, number one. We had six hangars in Dublin. And then we had hangars in, I think, London, Gatwick and in Copenhagen and Manchester as well. But we had a very big engineering technical services team. And technical services for anybody who doesn't know, what we did was we provided a service for airlines where we were the engineering department for an airline. So we looked after Aer Lingus A330 and A320, family aircraft, technical services, Futura, Pegasus. And what technical services was, was evaluating service bulletins, evaluating airworthiness directives, issuing engineering orders, answering query notes from the hangar floor as to how to fix a problem. And it was fantastic exposure to the airline industry as well. So then FLS turned into SR Technics. There was a whole other story there. But luckily for me, seven years later, 2007, one of my ex-classmates from university, had left a couple of years earlier to join Oryx Aviation, a leasing company. And that's something that I had seen when I was at SR Technics all the time was people leaving to join leasing companies. And I didn't really know exactly what a leasing company was, but I remember in our engineering team, there was a fear of leasing companies. There was a fear of getting a job at a leasing company and having to pack your bag and say goodbye to your family and never see them again. And then as soon as you get home with a new ticket, then you are gone again.
So a lot of people were really afraid of joining leasing companies. But my friend who had joined Oryx phoned me. He said, look, Oryx are hiring. We think you'd be a good fit. Luckily for me, I knew two of the technical bosses in Oryx. So Donal Lowry was engineering manager at Aer Lingus before moving to be the Head of technical in Oryx and then Paddy Ryan was head of planning in Shannon Aerospace when I was there before becoming into Oryx. So I knew the guys very well. Did an interview, interviewed with Mr. Power, who was your last podcast guest. And luckily for me, Oryx offered me a job. So I took a leap of faith. I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I sat down at the time with my fiancee Ruth, who's now my wife, and we discussed it and we said, yeah, look, let's give it a go, I mean, you know, I couldn't really define how much travel I do, what the job is going to be. I knew there was going to be some travel, but we said it's for your career, so let's do it.
So 2007 joined Oryx Aviation as a technical services manager and just really looking after all sorts of aspects of the technical side of aircraft leasing. And it was there where I started to transition aircraft. And I spent, I didn't spend a lot of time on the road, but I spent a lot more time on the road for sure. It wasn't as bad as what people made it out to be. But at the same time, you did have to spend long chunks of time away from home. So I spent a lot of time in Istanbul, Manchester, Prague, Hanover, a lot of time in Russia actually as well, just transitioning aircraft from one operator to another. But I learned a huge amount in Oryx. So Oryx was a great learning place for a lot of people in aircraft leasing now, for really just connecting the technical side of aviation. And the commercial side of aviation, bringing it together and really seeing how, you know, it's much more than just the nuts and bolts of aircraft and keeping them moving. It's also all of the financial side behind us and how money was made from aircraft. But also in Oryx aviation, it was a really, a really good grounding to accountability and to being, you know, really taking it to really taking charge of a project, owning a project and delivering on that project. And I think that's a reason why so many good technical people, for sure, came from Oryx. But during my time in Oryx, I transitioned a number of old A320s from Thomas Cook airline in Manchester Airport. And the two technical managers at Thomas Cook happened to be two gentlemen called Lucas Molen and Ian Clark, who we all know very well.
So I took those aircraft back from Thomas Cook in Manchester, kept redelivering aircraft for Oryx. I was up in Presswick a few years after that, redelivering an aircraft from Ryner and I got a phone call and it was a certain Ian Clark from, used to work in Thomas Cook and he had joined this fantastic new leasing company that had been started in Dublin in 2010. And we had read all the reports and read all the news about this new company called Avolon that was, you know, it was bringing in the funds that were bringing in and the order books with Boeing and the order books with Airbus. And we were reading these stories thinking this was a great place to work. So what had happened was that Lucas Mullen became the Chief Technical Officer in Avolon, the first chief technical officer in Avolon. And then, a couple of years later, he brought over Ian Clark to help him. So Lucas and Ian were now from Thomas Cook in Avolon. And Ian called me and he said, look, we're hiring. We're going to expand the technical team in Avolon. I remember you from the Manchester days. Would you be interested?
So it took me about a second and a half, I would say, to think that one over. I was straight on the phone to Lucas. Set up my interviews, went through a whole day of interviews in Avolon. At that time, Avolon interviews were maybe six or seven interviews for a whole day. And it was one after another. And at the end of the day, you got to sit down with Donal Slattery and John Higgins for an hour. And that was very interesting. But after a few hiccups, I'd say, I managed to get into Avolon. And at that time, our technical team was, I think, four or five, six people. And we were really jacks of all trades. We were, we done a bit of everything. So we weren't big enough to expand into specialized roles. We were building new aircraft. We were delivering new aircraft. We were beginning to plan transitioning of older aircraft. We were doing bits and pieces of everything, asset management, the whole lot. And so it was an awful lot different to Oryx because Oryx was an established leasing company transitioning aircraft that were naturally coming off lease.
Avolon in 2014 were only four years old, so there was very little transition activity. It was all very exciting. It was, you know, quick trips abroad with marketing people to secure sale and lease back deals or secure the placement of an aircraft or deliver a new aircraft. It was very exciting work, but lots of travel. But it was really, really enjoyable. Like I remember leaving Dublin a number of times on a Sunday evening, flying to Ho Chi Minh City for maybe be there on a Monday after Monday evening, have meetings all day Tuesday, be on a plane Tuesday evening back in Dublin on Wednesday at lunchtime. And it was lots of that. It was just, you know, it was lots of travel and very quick trips, but it was really, really exciting.
And then Avolon grew. So Avolon went public, then H&A, the Chinese large airline that they bought us out in 2016. And then we took on HACAC aviation, then we took on CIT aviation in 2017. And it was at that point that Avolon just, the technical, the need for a big technical team was there now. The need to split the team into different roles, different areas became very apparent. Luckily for me, I had shown a real interest in new aircraft. So I was asked to sort of be part of a new aircraft team. So I was second in command in a team full of people who built new aircraft, delivered new aircraft, but also run the engineering team, who the engineering team in a leasing company really is the team that changes the spec of the aircraft, from one airline spec to another during a transition. Worked in that team then from 2017, honoured the whole time up until last year. And last year, at that time, Chief Technical Officer Felipe Campos was promoted to Chief Operating Officer here in Dublin. And luckily for me, I got the role of Head of Technical in Avolon at that point. So, something I've been doing for the last six, seven months, enjoying every moment of it, but extremely, extremely busy.

Alok: Excellent. If I may just say so, you know, hard work is what you do and luck is what you get in return.

Enda Swan: Yeah, absolutely.

Alok: I think that's what has happened in your case. So congratulations on achieving that. And I know you have not named a few people and that's fine. Having said that, it's a small world, you know, like all the people you have named, few of them who you have named. We are all still connected with them and we are seeing them in various forms involved in the industry and still contributing, which is great. I don't want this to become an Oryx podcast, but coincidentally, the last conversation was also focusing a lot on Oryx for obvious reasons. And just a disclaimer, we are not being paid by Oryx.

Enda Swan: Yeah.

Alok: But we like the people who have come out of there, obviously. So it is great. And the people are still there. There is something I must share with you. For me, one of the reasons why I reached out to you to speak with you is, is because I am from technical background myself. I have been an aircraft engineer pretty much most of my life. And most of my working life, obviously, is what I mean. And I've been very close to the technical side of the business. And last few episodes which we have recorded in my podcast have focused on commercial, sales, business models. And I have been meaning to get into the nitty-gritty of tech. I think no better person than you, obviously, given what you're doing now at this big leasing company in which the tech ops is your responsibility. And that's one of the reasons. So for me, this podcast episode is really special because it's a subject I enjoy the most, apart from everything else.

Enda Swan: Probably the best subject to look.

Alok: Yeah, I still love it. I wish I could still go on the airplanes and inspect them. I wish I can. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to move on to some of the tech pieces of the business, you know? And we will see, we'll do a little back and forth and maybe touch upon some other generic subjects. I do intend to ask a little bit about Avolon also, given what you are doing in Avolon and that you have a key role in Avolon to play now. But I think first and foremost, what I want to understand from you is technical asset management. Now, in last few episodes, you have spoken about asset management and balance sheet lessors, asset management lessors and all. But what I want to understand is, in all these cases, there is a common factor, tech asset management, technical asset management.

Enda Swan: It's a great question because I think no matter what aircraft leasing company you walk into, asset management will have a different role in each one of them. But certainly, asset management for Avolon, it's really the management of our aircraft, our assets while they're on lease to somebody. So technical asset management for us is a vital part of the technical team. And that's not always the case in some other leasing companies. Other leasing companies will have an asset management team that, I guess, would be a bit like what we would see as contracts or customer engagement in Avolon, which is sort of utilizations and, and just managing the sort of all of the different tasks that are in the contract, all the different milestones. For Avolon, technical asset management is a portion of the technical work. And the portion of it that it is, it's managing the aircraft while it's on lease to one of our airline customers. So when the aircraft is on lease to one of our airline customers, there's a few different, a few very important role, a few very important tasks that have to be looked at constantly. So one would be, for example, management of maintenance reserves and maintenance events. So as an aircraft gets older, there are some very big milestone maintenance events that are carried out on the aircraft. It's a bit like taking your car to the garage for a service every year, every two years, whatever it is. For most aircraft, you have heavy airframe checks.
So on an Airbus aircraft, it's a six-year, a 12-year check. On a Boeing, it's probably eight, 10, 12 years along those lines. But these are heavier than normal structural checks. You have your landing gear overhaul, your APU overhaul, your engine performance restoration, and engine LLPs. So these are the big maintenance events. And when your airline customer performs these maintenance events, our asset management team will be the team that will look over these events and make sure that everything that has to be done in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions has been done. And it's been done per the right instruction. Once we are happy with the maintenance that it's been done in accordance with all of the proper instructions, we will then give the go ahead to refund the airline with any maintenance reserve pots that have been built up over the over the utilization of the aircraft to look after the maintenance, those maintenance events. So that's one of the prime roles for our technical asset management team. We have some other roles then.
So for example, we would also we would also look after the periodic condition inspections of the aircraft. And that's where we will go to see the aircraft, inspect the records, or we will ask a company like Acumen to go and do that on our behalf. And that's where we go. We visit our aircraft. We have a look at the records. We will scan the records, make sure that we have copies of the records in our possession. But that really is just to protect the integrity of the aircraft. and make sure that the value is being retained in that asset. You know, we can't ever get away from the fact that these aircraft can be worked up to 150, 160 million dollars. So it's not, you know, it's not something that we that we want to be taking our eye off. We want to make sure that the aircraft's being kept as one piece. It's been kept in good condition and it's been kept operational. The other part of the technical asset management role that we would have would be asset surveillance, and it's a bit. It's a bit like the condition report, but it's just this constant monitoring of the airline. It's the constant monitoring of the utilisation of the aircraft.
We all know that aircraft sit on the ground from very for various times. So during a maintenance check or, you know, every now and again, you will see patterns where airlines might rest an aircraft or not use an aircraft. But when you see something unusual in the utilisation of the aircraft, that's usually a warning sign for us that something is not right. And that's something could be the airline might be in financial trouble. They may not be able to afford to buy a part. The aircraft might have had an event and we need to investigate it further. So really, to us, that's the technical asset management role of aircraft leasing. It can be a little bit further, as I said, so it can be sort of like a contract management role as well, technical asset management in other leasing companies.
Then, I guess the technical asset management just takes in all of the technical part of the aircraft leasing. And all of the technical part would be sort of my role at the moment. So my role at the moment being the head of technical, I manage a team of over 50 engineers and technical professionals. And we really look after our aircraft from the time that they're just aligned on a purchase agreement with Airbus or with Boeing. We take that aircraft, that sort of obligation to take delivery of an aircraft. We have to work with an airline and the OEM. We have to build that aircraft for the airline.
We have to then deliver that aircraft to the airline. We manage the aircraft when it's on lease through our technical asset management function. But also, the technical team are the team that really move the aircraft from airline to airline. So when the lease expires with one aircraft, you're moving it to the next one, you could be changing the spec of the aircraft, changing the interior, changing some avionic mods, repainting the aircraft, moving it from one jurisdiction to another. And then also you're dealing with the end of life of that asset. So when it comes to the time to take that asset off of your books, how do you do it? Do you do it through trading? At which point the technical team have to support the trading activity. It could be through part out or it could be through something like what we've got into recently, which is passenger freighter conversions as well. So technical asset management can be all of that or it can be a part of that. In Avolon, it just happens to be part of the wider technical function.

Alok: So when you say it's part of the wider technical function, it drives me, I can't help but think about something. What I came across over a decade back was, and this was, I'm talking about pre-Avolon era really, there were leasing companies I interacted with. Maybe I can name one of them who's not around anymore, ILFC for example. Since they're not there, I hope I'm safe to name them. So

Enda Swan: We'll see, we'll find out.

Alok: We'll find out when this episode is published. And then there were other leasing companies, which I will not name. They had different ways of working, and especially it came to technical. So one thing you have touched upon is how you carry out regular inspections of the assets. You run an inspection program. But I very categorically remember ILFC had no such program. And the reason I remember is, having met the people who were running the show there, their thinking was complete hands-off, quite enjoyment, clause of lease agreement, they're not touching the asset, something goes wrong, then we will go in and do what we need to do. And obviously, they were a very big leasing company, 1000 plus airplanes when they were sold finally or acquired. And then there was another set of lessors we came across who were very proactive, annual, two-year. What, in your opinion, works better and why?

Enda Swan: I guess, so fundamentally, the requirements to periodically inspect your aircraft and to know what the condition of the aircraft is, is probably going to come from the funding of your company and how your company is set up. So, for example, if you're an aircraft leasing company that's set up through a bank, you know, so like, for example, Avolon took over C&T. number of years ago. So CIT had a very successful and a very large aircraft leasing company that we all knew very well. And they probably didn't spend as much time inspecting aircraft that were on lease. The same thing, it was quite enjoyment to let the operator use the aircraft per the lease. And at the back end of a lease, you're always protected by the return conditions that you have on your lease anyway.
So you should be able to, if the airline survives and if the aircraft goes through its natural lease term, you should be able to predict what you're going to get back in any event and what way the aircraft is going to be, what way the records are going to be. But if you're a company then that's actually, you're privately funded or it's money that you're taking on loan from a bank and that bank actually wants to wants to know what the condition of their assets is that they want to know what it's going to be looking like more regularly. So you have to do those periodic inspections. To me, for me, I think the right answer is really it's down to the it's down to your risk assessment of the airline. So again, you know, if you're if you have your aircraft on you're not so worried about the condition of that aircraft. You know, if you're if you have your aircraft on lease to an airline that has two or 300 airlines, it's a flag carrier. It's always going to be in place. All the aircraft are kept well. They're always in the media. Everybody flies with them. You know, you're pretty sure that your aircraft is going to be kept in good condition. Whereas if you if your aircraft is one aircraft of a fleet of four flying for a smaller airline. in a riskier country or a riskier jurisdiction, then you're going to want to inspect that aircraft a little bit more regularly. Because I think the chances of you maybe having to step in at some point to take that aircraft back earlier than the end of the lease term is much higher. So you're always going to want to know to some extent what your next move is going to be or to be able to quantify. Nearly always be able to quantify what your next move is going to be with that asset.

Alok: Then that obviously plays a role into the cost aspect of it. I think, as you rightly said, it is a credit worthiness of the airline, really the risk assessment which drives that requirement. And so in my mind, I'm still not sure why somebody like ILFC would never inspect, but even if it is bank's money, but I see your point, what you're saying from their perspective. Maybe that made sense for them. Maybe they were placing them in their mind in all A credit airlines. And so, moving on from that subject on the whole technical asset management, obviously in what you do, one of the key functions is managing the budget or how the allotted money is spent by the department. And this is possibly close to our hearts, both of our hearts from our previous backgrounds. So when I was in an airline and I was running the line maintenance and all, I was always at odds in getting budgetary approvals because engineering is considered a cost center when you're in the airline at least. At least the time I remember I'm sure it's the same pretty much right now. How is it for a typical leasing company? I'm not asking about Avolon by the way but a typical leasing company in your opinion. How does it consider it? Because what you have said falls in between, right? It could make money for the leasing company too, in some ways.

Enda Swan: As my finance colleagues always remind me, we're very good at spending money in the technical team here in Avolon. But look, aircraft maintenance is expensive, and aircraft are expensive to maintain. So it's just one of the functions of owning aircraft, I guess. But you're right, if you're an engineering team, a technical team in an airline, you are a cost center. So you're a part of the company that can make money. So if you think back to the example I gave you about Thomas Cook, for example, where Lucas and Ian and Manchester Airport, that was a prime example. It was a hanger where Thomas Cook airlines would contract Thomas Cook maintenance to do maintenance for them. And in return, Thomas Cook maintenance would recharge that maintenance back to the airline again and make money to pay the engineers, pay the facility, to pay whatever bills they had.
We don't work like that in leasing companies for sure. In leasing companies, I think technical, the technical team are more of a service provider to the other teams in the in the in the leasing company, and that's the way we see ourselves as the technical team in Avolon for sure. So What we do is we just provide a service for the other teams that are in the company here. To give you some examples, so the marketing team, we would be a big, we provide a lot of services to our marketing team. We're always providing them with the specs of our aircraft, advise them on the configuration of our aircraft, what spec changes can be made to the aircraft, what maintenance has been accomplished on the aircraft, what maintenance needs to be done on the aircraft. what needs to be done to transition an aircraft from one airline to another, to transition an aircraft from a jurisdiction to another.
So these are all questions that our marketing team would be asked by an airline when they sit in front of them trying to market an aircraft to them. And these are all answers that we would provide to our marketing team, arm our marketing team so that they're able to answer those questions to the airlines. Other teams that we would be provide a big service to would be, let's say, for example, our risk team. So we touched on the surveillance of aircraft just a few seconds, a few minutes ago. And the surveillance of aircraft is very important for our risk team to know. You know, so they're reviewing the airlines all the time to see what airlines are, should we be worried about what airlines? Should we place more aircraft with, what airlines should we place less aircraft with? And the way that we would be providing a service to them is that we're always telling them the condition of our aircraft, if maintenance events are being done, if they're being done correctly, what service providers are they using, what service providers are accomplishing the maintenance for them, are the aircraft being kept operational, but very important, can we move aircraft all the time? So You know, we have to be able to, at any point, be able to say to our risk team that, yeah, our aircraft are flying with airline X, but you know something, we feel confident that if we had to go in there tomorrow or next week, that we would be in some way able to repossess those airplanes or take those airplanes back, because that forms a vital part of the decision making tree that the risk team would have to get to. The finance team, so our finance team, so as I said earlier, we do like spending a lot of money in the technical team.
And I can tell you that no more so than building new airplanes, because when you build new airplanes, you're spending huge amounts of money well before the aircraft is even delivered from Airbus or Boeing. So when we build an aircraft, let's say we're building a Boeing 787, you're actually committing to spend money on that aircraft for... maybe 24 months before the aircraft arrives into your possession. You're speccing the aircraft with Airbus or Boeing. And it's our obligation to buy the furniture that goes on to that aircraft. So the furniture, the buyer furnished equipment, we call it BFE. And BFE for an aircraft is very, I mean, for a 787, typically 10, 12, 14 million, depending on the spec of the airline. So it's very expensive. But What it means is that we have to be able to show our finance team what the movement of money is going to be in the next number of years so that they can plan for being able to fund the business adequately. It's the same thing with transition budgets. So when removing aircraft from airline to airline, it's also to put the transition budgets together. And the transition budget would include changing any spec items on the aircraft. You're changing the spec from airline A into airline B spec because they'll have a different operating requirement. You'll have to paint the aircraft, you'll have to pay reps to be on site, you'll have to pay for flights and hotels and aviation authority certificates and licenses. So the budget to move an aircraft from one airline to another is quite large as well. And then really, I guess the other team would be the legal team. So we do spend a lot of time working with our legal team and they'd be a big customer of ours to, you know, to help them negotiate LOIs, negotiate leases, make sure that all of the proper technical covenants and aspects are contained in the, in the lease agreement. But also if a dispute comes up with an airline, we want, we are the ones who the legal team would come to, to get some technical expertise to make sure that our side of the argument is correct and we're pursuing that argument in the right direction. So I see us more of a service provider to the other teams in the Avolon team rather than a cost center.

Alok: I think the next thing which I wanted to ask is you have mentioned, very nicely explaining your career path, how you heard about Avolon, this great new leasing company starting at that time, right, 2010. And obviously, you worked hard through the ranks. What I want to understand is, in your opinion, from where you are and how you have shaped your career in Avolon, what do you think makes Avolon special? What is, you know, it's a new leasing company, right, in comparison

Enda Swan: Is it?

Alok: to many other legacy lessors. So it would be great to know that.

Enda Swan: It's a fascinating question because to me, it's a fascinating company. So I said to you earlier, I joined Avolon in October 2014. To me, it feels like I'm still a new person in the company. I still feel like I'm new every nearly every week. I get that feeling that I'm a new person here. And I guess that's just because I'm learning something new every day in this company. It's definitely the most enjoyable company I've ever worked in. It's a fantastic company. And we were just talking at lunchtime about it, about, you know, people who've left the company and the amount of times that we get approached by people who've left the company to see is there is there an avenue back into Avolon again? Because I think once people leave, they realize that was a good place to be. It certainly is.
For me, I think you have to break it down into three different areas, three prime areas for Avolon. So firstly, it's the people. The people here are just phenomenal people. It's a phenomenal ex-co that we have here at the moment, phenomenal leadership team, right the way down to the people working on the first floor here. It's a fantastic place. We've over 200