Avtrac Companies

Call Directions Website

Avtrac Companies As a trusted technical advisor and asset manager for the commercial aviation industry since 1992, Av

06/10/2026

A pre-owned jet can pass a visual inspection and still carry a value problem nobody has found yet.

In business aviation deals, the timeline is usually set by the buyer's calendar, not by the aircraft's records. Pre-purchase inspections get scoped around the airframe and engines, and the logbooks get a lighter read.

The gaps that matter rarely show up as damage. They look like a missing release certificate for a component swap, an AD record that doesn't trace back, or a modification without complete approval data. None of it grounds the aircraft today. All of it gets found by the next buyer's team.

That's when an owner learns the records were part of the asset all along, and they get priced accordingly.

Avtrac's Commercial Accounts Director, John Eichten, will be at NBAA-BACE in Las Vegas, 20–22 October, West Hall booth 4943. He'll be discussing acquisition due diligence, records audits and conformity checks for owners and flight departments.

Not every aircraft returning in 2027 will fly again.With current-generation narrowbodies holding value and engines in sh...
06/10/2026

Not every aircraft returning in 2027 will fly again.

With current-generation narrowbodies holding value and engines in short supply, a meaningful share of returns won’t go to the next operator — they’ll be parted out, with engines and major components worth more apart than the airframe is whole.

Here’s what gets overlooked: teardown value is a records story too.

A green-time engine, a landing gear, an APU — their market value depends on the traceability that travels with them. A serviceable component with complete, verifiable back-to-birth documentation commands a price. The same physical part with a gap in its history sells at a discount, if it sells at all. The teardown market is unforgiving about paperwork precisely because the buyer inherits the trace.

So the discipline that protects a re-placement — clean records, verified condition, no surprises — is the same discipline that protects a part-out. An asset’s exit route often isn’t decided until late, which is exactly why the records need to be in order early, before you know which door the aircraft leaves through.

Residual value doesn’t care whether the aircraft’s next life is in the air or on a bench. It cares whether the story checks out.

05/10/2026

Most of the MRO capacity conversation is about engine shops. The airframe side deserves more attention from lessors.

KPMG's 2026 Aviation 2030 report on MRO describes a structural bottleneck: longer turnaround times, scarce shop slots, and regional capacity that's under-used.

For lease returns, that means booking redelivery checks earlier, often at a facility neither the lessor nor the airline has worked with before. An unfamiliar MRO plus a compressed timeline is where return disputes start. Nobody has agreed in advance what "return condition" means inside that hangar's work package.

Three things help. Book the slot earlier than feels necessary. Agree the records and inspection scope before induction, not after. And have someone on site who represents the asset, not the work order.

The hangar slot is the constraint. The records decide how long you hold it.

🔗 https://bit.ly/4hWapuL

Earlier this year a UK court jailed the director of a parts company for putting tens of thousands of components into the...
29/09/2026

Earlier this year a UK court jailed the director of a parts company for putting tens of thousands of components into the global fleet with forged release certificates.

The paperwork looked right. That was the whole point.

For anyone who manages aircraft records, the AOG Technics case is worth sitting with, because it breaks a comfortable assumption: that a clean-looking Form 1 or 8130 is the same thing as a verified one. Tens of thousands of parts moved through the CFM56 aftermarket carrying documentation that named originators who never issued it.

The lesson isn’t “panic about your parts.” It’s that a records file is only worth the verification behind it — and verification means going back to the issuer, not just confirming a certificate exists and the boxes are filled.

This matters most where records get scrutinised hardest: transitions. When an asset changes hands, the trace either holds up to a buyer’s or next-lessee’s technical review, or it doesn’t. The time to find a questionable document is during the lease, on your own timeline — not across the table from a counterparty’s inspector.

Trust the record. But verify what’s behind it first.

The most expensive redeliveries share a common history: nobody looked at the aircraft between delivery and return.It’s a...
22/09/2026

The most expensive redeliveries share a common history: nobody looked at the aircraft between delivery and return.

It’s an easy trap. A leased aircraft in steady service doesn’t demand attention. The records accumulate somewhere, the maintenance happens on the operator’s system, and everyone assumes the paper trail will be there when it’s needed.

Then the lease ends, the aircraft comes back, and the gaps surface all at once — a missing overhaul trace, a component with no clear provenance, an airworthiness statement that has to be rebuilt from whatever can be verified rather than read straight off the file.

Every one of those gaps is cheaper to close while the aircraft is flying than in the pressure of a redelivery window with a lease-end date bearing down.

Mid-lease due diligence isn’t a compliance box. It’s residual-value insurance. A short, structured check partway through the lease — physical condition and records together — turns “what will we find at return” into “we already know.”

The lessors who plan for 2027 well won’t start at return. They’ll start now, with the aircraft they’ll hand back or re-place in eighteen months.

18/09/2026

The way aircraft inspections are conducted hasn't fundamentally changed in decades — clipboards, paper checklists, disconnected photos, and manual report writing.

That ends now.

I'm proud to introduce AeroWalk Pro™ — the first fully integrated mobile inspection, asset management, and compliance reporting platform built exclusively for commercial aviation.

✈️ Structured, aircraft-type-specific mobile walkaround workflows
📸 Photo and video capture with automatic geotagging and timestamps
🔄 Real-time bidirectional sync with asset management systems
🤖 AI-assisted defect detection and predictive maintenance analytics
📄 Automated investor-grade and operator-grade PDF reports — instantly

AeroWalk Pro eliminates manual data entry, cuts reporting time from days to minutes, and gives lessors, operators, and asset managers real-time fleet visibility — from anywhere in the world.

Whether you're managing mid-lease inspections, redeliveries, or portfolio-wide condition monitoring, AeroWalk Pro delivers the data that protects value and the reporting that drives confident decisions.

Watch the overview below. 👇

Here’s the paradox shaping every 2027 fleet plan: the aircraft owners most want to retire are holding their value better...
15/09/2026

Here’s the paradox shaping every 2027 fleet plan: the aircraft owners most want to retire are holding their value better than they have in years.

Why? Supply isn’t arriving on schedule. Hundreds of GTF-powered A320neos are still grounded waiting on the powder-metal inspection programme, which now stretches to the end of this year. Boeing’s MAX 7 and MAX 10 are only now closing on certification, with first deliveries not expected until 2027. Appraisers are openly noting that production delays and engine issues are extending the life of the current-generation fleet — and lifting the values of older narrowbodies that not long ago looked close to the exit.

For lessors, that cuts two ways.

The upside: the assets you’re carrying are worth more than the model said they would be.

The catch: when the replacements finally arrive and the delayed returns unfreeze, they move at once — into the same finite pool of transition and records capacity.

A strong residual is only realised if you can transition the asset cleanly when the moment comes. That’s a mid-lease question, not a redelivery-week one.

11/09/2026

When something happens on the ramp, the first 30 minutes of documentation can determine the outcome of a claim months later.

AeroWalk Pro gives ground teams and inspectors a fast, structured way to capture incident and damage findings on the spot — photos, location, notes, and severity, all timestamped and geotagged.

That evidence is automatically compiled into a clear, professional report, ready to share with insurers, lessors, or maintenance teams immediately.

Better documentation at the moment of impact means a stronger position at every step that follows.

See how AeroWalk Pro captures incident documentation in real time — link in comments.

The redelivery pipeline doesn't compete with itself. It competes with the rest of the heavy maintenance calendar.With en...
09/09/2026

The redelivery pipeline doesn't compete with itself. It competes with the rest of the heavy maintenance calendar.

With engine programs consuming shop capacity at unprecedented levels and a redelivery wave building, the squeeze point in late 2026 is not going to be skilled labor on the airframe. It's slot allocation at the shops the redelivery scope routes into.

Most lessor redelivery plans assume the MRO will take the work because the work is paid for. That assumption holds in normal cycles. It doesn't hold when the same shops are sitting on multi-year engine backlogs and operators are paying premium to keep aircraft flyable.

The lessors who book MRO slots 6-9 months ahead of scheduled return — and hold those slots through the records work — will redeliver on time. The ones who plan slot-by-slot at the back end will absorb delay.

In a tight market, the redelivery schedule starts at the shop slot, not the lease expiry.

Urgent Action Needed to Ease Engine MRO Bottlenecks https://bit.ly/3QPrkV3

The 2027 transition wave will be a hallway conversation at every leasing event this autumn — and it should be.I’ll be at...
08/09/2026

The 2027 transition wave will be a hallway conversation at every leasing event this autumn — and it should be.

I’ll be at AE Growth Frontiers in London and ISTAT EMEA in Copenhagen this month, and the question I most want to trade notes on isn’t “how big is the wave.” It’s “what separates a clean transition from an expensive one.”

My working answer: the outcome is usually set long before the aircraft comes back — by whether the asset was watched during the lease, not just at the two bookends of delivery and return.

If you’ll be in either room and your fleet has 2026–2027 returns on the horizon, I’d value the conversation.

London: meetings.hubspot.com/adam-belusko/airline-economics-london-2026

Copenhagen: meetings.hubspot.com/adam-belusko/istat-emea-2026

Address

Bodiam House, Amberley Court
Crawley

Telephone

+441293618881

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Avtrac Companies posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category