Aircraft Financing Quotes

Ryanair had managed to strike a deal on eleven Boeing 737 aircraft that were all ten years old and had to put down $20m from its own coffers as a one-third deposit on the finance lease. The rest was to be paid off over the next five years with bank loans from New York, leaving the airline with fairly modest cash reserves. Ryanair,

Underhill had an idea for much safer, faster transport than autos or even aircraft. “Ten minutes from Princeton to Lands Command, twenty minutes across the continent. See, you dig these tunnels along minimum-time arcs, evacuate the air from them, and just let gravity do the work.” By Unnerby’s watch, there was a five-second pause. Then: “Oops, little problem there. The minimum-time solution for Princeton to Lands Command would go down kinda deep…like six hundred miles. I probably couldn’t convince even the General to finance it.” “You are right about that!” And the two were off in an extended argument about less-than-optimal tunnel arcs and trade-offs against air travel. The deep tunnel idea was really dumb, it turned out.

RAND proved formative. Some of its employees joked that it stood for “Research And No Development,” and its intellectualism was inspiring to the young economist. The think tank’s ethos was to work on problems so hard that they might actually be unsolvable.9 Four days of the week were dedicated to RAND projects, but the fifth was free for freewheeling personal research. Ken Arrow, a famous economist, and John Nash, the game theorist immortalized in the film A Beautiful Mind, both consulted for RAND around the time Sharpe was there. The eclecticism of RAND’s research community is reflected in his first published works, which were a proposal for a smog tax and a review of aircraft compartment design criteria for Army deployments.

One understands, then, why the Americans make such a show of their debt. The initiative is supposed to shame the State for its bad management and alert the citizens to an imminent collapse of the finances and public services. But the exorbitant scale of the figures robs them of all meaning. It is, in fact, just a massive advertising exercise and, indeed, the luminous billboard looks for all the world like a triumphant stock market index that has broken all records. The population contemplate it with the fascination they might accord to a world record (though few gather in front of the Beaubourg digital clock to see the run-in to the end of the century). At the same time, the people are collectively in the same situation as the Tupolev test pilot who right up to the last second could see his aircraft nose dive and crash into the ground on his internal video circuit. Did he, by some last-minute reflex, glance at the image as he died? He could have imagined himself living out his last moments in virtual reality. Did the image survive the man if only for a fraction of a second? Or was it the other way about? Does virtual reality survive the real world's catastrophic end?

Finance is not a hard science like physics or engineering; rather, it’s a social science. The difference is this: a bridge, electrical circuit, or aircraft will always respond in exactly the same way to a given set of circumstances, while the financial markets do not,