Aviation finance lawyers and the Cape Town Convention.

Cape Town is usually sold to a board as a single fact: the aircraft is collateral, the interest is registered, the asset comes back. That summary survives contact with exactly one jurisdiction at a time. Article XI of the Aircraft Protocol offers each contracting state a choice about what happens in an insolvency, and the state has to make that choice in writing, with the depositary. Until it does, the choice does not exist for anyone relying on it from outside.

Ireland is the cleanest illustration available, and it is the home jurisdiction. Ireland acceded to the Convention and the Aircraft Protocol in 2005 and made no Article XI declaration at the time. Alternative A, with its sixty-day cure-or-surrender period for an insolvency officer, arrived only through the International Interests in Mobile Equipment (Cape Town Convention)(Aircraft Protocol) Order 2017, which took effect on 10 May 2017 - recorded in UNIDROIT’s own declaration record for Ireland and set out in McCann FitzGerald’s note on the Order. Twelve years separated the treaty from the remedy, in the jurisdiction that hosts the register itself.

The United Kingdom took the opposite route on timing and a longer one on content. It deposited its instrument of ratification on 27 July 2015, the Convention and Protocol entered into force for it on 1 November 2015, and Alternative A with a sixty-day waiting period was declared at ratification. It also lodged declarations under Convention Articles 39(1)(a) and (b), 39(4), 52, 53 and 54(2) and Protocol Articles XXIX and XXX(1) to (3), preserving priority for specified categories of non-consensual right over a registered international interest, as Pillsbury set out in its October 2015 client alert. The headline is true and close to useless; the declaration bundle is the operative fact, and reading it is a standing task rather than a closing checklist item.

This matters for a structural reason rather than a doctrinal one. The treaty is uniform. The declaration is not, and the declaration is what a judge applies. A fleet placed with carriers in eight states is exposed to eight different insolvency outcomes and eight sets of local non-consensual interests that may or may not outrank a registered international interest, and that exposure moves without anyone at the lessor doing anything: Uganda acceded on 11 October 2024 with effect from 1 February 2025, Benin on 20 March 2025 with effect from 1 July 2025, and Georgia and Lithuania in late August 2025 with effect from 1 December 2025, all per UNIDROIT’s status page. UNIDROIT’s 2026 list of Aircraft Protocol states parties runs to 87 contracting states plus the European Union, and the map is a live position, not a closing-day snapshot.

There is also a price attached to the quality of a state’s own paperwork. Under the OECD Aircraft Sector Understanding of 2011, a state that is a party to the Convention, has made the qualifying declarations and has implemented as required becomes eligible for a reduced minimum export-credit insurance premium - a Cape Town discount capped at 10 percent of the minimum premium rate, as the Oxford Business Law Blog set out in January 2024. Declaration hygiene is a line item in the financing terms available to an airline, and therefore in the terms a lessor can quote it.

Aircraft Leasing Ireland reported on 12 November 2025 that its member firms and their groups manage 9,504 aircraft - 64 percent of the world’s leased fleet by count, out of 14,678 - worth more than $315bn, or 69 percent by value, with a further 2,383 on order. Against that, the Central Statistics Office counted 3,005 people employed across Ireland’s entire aircraft-leasing sector in 2024, in its release of 13 August 2025 - every function, not just legal, and up 7.2 percent on the 2,804 of 2019.

Put those two facts next to each other and the shape of the market is obvious. Two-thirds of the world’s leased fleet is administered by a workforce that would fit inside one mid-sized bank. Legal departments inside it range from a single generalist counsel at a small platform to about thirty lawyers at the largest Dublin-headquartered lessor, per its own Legal 500 GC Powerlist entry for Ireland in 2023. Below the top tier there is no separate compliance function, no portfolio-management legal team, and no obvious home for a task that is neither a deal nor a dispute.

The demand side is not slowing to meet that. Airbus reported on 12 January 2026 that it delivered 793 aircraft in 2025 against 766 in 2024, into a record year-end backlog of 8,754 that included 1,124 widebodies. The Irish Times reported in January 2025, citing Aircraft Leasing Ireland, that leasing had grown from roughly a tenth of world airline fleets in the 1970s to 58 percent by the end of 2023. Delivery financing compounding at double digits, against a sector headcount that grew 7.2 percent in five years, is the arithmetic behind an empty seat.

Sartori’s Dublin cohort of 250 structured interviews includes 46 lawyers sitting in-house at aircraft lessors, engine lessors and aviation lenders. Across the twenty-four months to June 2026, 31 of those 46 could not name a single person inside the company who owned International Registry filing status across the fleet. Eighteen of the same 46 said the last end-to-end reconciliation of that position had been run by an auditor or by a purchaser’s diligence team rather than by their own department. Twelve said the first Cape Town question of the year had reached legal from treasury or from the insurance desk, not from a lawyer.

A deputy general counsel at an engine lessor put the problem in one line: the airframe file has an owner and the engine file has a folder. Engines are separately registrable objects under the Aircraft Protocol, with their own filings and their own repossession mechanics, and IBA reported in April 2024 that engine shop visits were climbing from roughly 2,500 in 2024 to roughly 3,500 in 2025 and would pass 4,000 in 2028.