Walk onto the apron at major international hubs and look closely at the painted registration code near the rear fuselage door. You will frequently spot an Italian, South American, or Asian airline operating a Boeing 787 or Airbus A320neo carrying the prefix EI- (Ireland) or VP-B (Bermuda).
Why would an airline headquartered thousands of miles from the North Atlantic register its commercial airframes in Dublin or Hamilton? The answer lies in the legal architecture of global aviation finance.
1. Over Half the World’s Fleet Is Leased
Modern widebody and narrowbody jets cost between $110 million and $380 million at list prices. Rather than tying up billions of dollars in sovereign debt or equity, airlines lease more than 50% of the global commercial fleet from aircraft lessors clustered in Dublin, Ireland (such as AerCap, SMBC Aviation Capital, and Avolon).
As documented in our Aircraft Tail Registration Decoder and Aviation Data Analysis, Ireland (EI- / EJ-) and Bermuda (VP-B / VQ-B) serve as the premier cross-border registries for leased commercial assets.
2. The Cape Town Convention and Repossession Speed
When an airline enters financial distress or ceases operations (a common event across the 1,600+ defunct carriers in our Defunct Airlines Archive), a lessor’s single greatest risk is having a $150 million aircraft grounded or impounded in a local court for years.
Under the Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment and ICAO Article 83 bis agreements, registering an aircraft in a neutral English common-law jurisdiction like Ireland or Bermuda while delegating day-to-day operational safety oversight to the local airline’s civil aviation authority gives lenders clear title protection. If lease payments default, the lessor can deregister the tail number and remarket the aircraft to another carrier within weeks without re-certifying the airframe’s maintenance logbooks from scratch.