Jumbo passenger jet orders reach $10bn on first day of aerospace show

BIG finance waded into a rain-soaked Paris Airshow with more than $10bn in orders for jumbo passenger jets, in a boost for Yorkshire’s aerospace supply chain, as planemakers duelled over strategy for large aircraft.

The world’s biggest aircraft lessor, a unit of General Electric, became the second buyer to endorse a larger version of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, weeks after the lightweight jet went back into service after a three-month grounding.

The GECAS subsidiary said it would sign up for 10 of the stretched 787-10 passenger planes, joining a $30bn order haul that industry sources say Boeing is assembling to formally launch the jet today. And an influential German leasing company, Doric Asset Finance, little known outside the specialist world of aviation financing, splashed out on 20 Airbus A380 superjumbos worth $8bn at list prices to anticipate rising demand.

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Total orders on day one of the world’s largest aerospace event swelled to more than $30bn in three hours.

But, despite the early flurry, the number of orders this year was expected to be down on the last Paris show in 2011, GECAS chief executive Norman Liu said.

“It is shifting to more of a wide-body story,” he said, referring to long-haul jets seating anywhere from 200 people on small wide-bodies to 525 on the double-decker A380. Doric, which is already involved in financing A380 jets for Emirates airline, the aircraft’s largest operator, said its deal would be finalised in months, with deliveries to start in 2016.

“We see how airlines that do not yet have the A380 are interested in it and approach us and ask questions, which shows us that there is pent-up demand for this aircraft,” Mark Lapidus, chief executive of Doric Lease Corp, said.

“If anything, we are perhaps under-ordering the A380.”

It is unclear whether Doric had identified its eventual custom- ers.

Lessors have until now been reluctant to back the A380 because it is highly customised and expensive to convert.

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