Irish lessors manage 9,504 of the world's 14,678 leased aircraft. By number that is 64% of the global leased fleet; by value it is 69%, more than US$315bn (€274bn), according to Aircraft Leasing Ireland figures published by Ibec on 12/11/2025. The same data puts 41% of the world's aircraft on lease. A satellite operator weighing an Irish lessor is entitled to ask what any of that has to do with a spacecraft, and the answer sits in the tools the aircraft share was built with rather than in the aircraft themselves.
The toolkit behind the share
Ireland's position in aircraft leasing rests on a short list of instruments, used the same way thousands of times over.
The first is one company per asset. Each aircraft sits in its own single-purpose vehicle that owns nothing else and has no other creditors. It can be sold, refinanced or pledged without disturbing the rest of a portfolio, and a lender to it is lending against one asset and one lease.
The second is Section 110 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997. A qualifying vehicle is taxed on a broadly neutral basis: what it earns passes out to its noteholders, so investors are taxed where they sit and the income is not taxed twice on the way.
The third is the treaty network. Ireland's double taxation agreements can reduce or remove withholding tax on lease rentals paid across borders, which matters when the lessee is in one country and the investors are spread across several others.
The fourth is people. Irish lawyers, tax advisers, trustees and corporate-services providers have documented, registered and enforced cross-border leases for decades, and the courts have heard the disputes that test them. None of the four is specific to aircraft. We set out where the wider analogy holds and where it breaks in From aviation to orbit.
Why satellites and ground stations fit
To a lessor, a communications satellite or a ground station looks much like an aircraft. Each is long-lived: a geostationary spacecraft is typically designed for around fifteen years in service, and an antenna on a concrete pad for longer. Each is contracted to one operator, whose customer revenue pays the rent. Each needs a vehicle that holds title cleanly, and that title has to be enforceable wherever the lessee is based, which for a satellite operator is often a long way from Dublin.
The product that suits this is the finance lease. In the leases Caelum writes, rent over the term repays the full price the vehicle paid for the asset, the operator holds an option to buy it back for a nominal sum at the end, and there is no return of the asset to the lessor. The operator keeps the orbital slot, the spectrum filings, the customers and the residual. The lessor's return is the rent stream, and its credit decision is about the operator's contracted revenue over the term. Readers coming to the asset class for the first time will find the layers of a satellite business set out in Space Assets 101.
The handover point matters too. Taking title once a spacecraft has passed its in-orbit tests means the lease starts against a working asset with measured performance, and we walked through how that clause works in in-orbit delivery explained.
Where the analogy breaks: the registry
Aircraft finance has the Cape Town Convention, agreed in 2001, and its aircraft protocol, to which Ireland is a party. Together they give a lessor's interest a place in an international registry, a priority ranking against other creditors, and a set of default remedies, including deregistration and export of the aircraft, that contracting states have agreed to honour. A lessor in Dublin can enforce against an aircraft sitting in another contracting state with a reasonable idea of how long it will take.
A protocol on space assets to the same convention was adopted in Berlin on 09/03/2012. It is not yet in force, and there is no international registry in which a lessor can record its interest in a satellite. A spacecraft also cannot be flown to a friendly jurisdiction. Whatever protects a satellite lessor today has to be built from other material.
That material comes in three parts. The first is the contract: a lease that fixes the rent, the events of default and the remedies in detail, governed by a law chosen for predictability. The second is security over the operator's revenue, meaning the customer contracts and receivables the asset generates and the accounts they are paid into, so that the cash the satellite earns reaches the lessor before it reaches anyone else. The third is the right to step in: on default, the lessor can take over operation of the asset, keep it earning or hand it to a replacement operator.
How the structure fills the gap
The finance lease form is what makes those three parts sufficient. Because rent repays the full price over the term, the lessor is not relying on repossessing the satellite and re-leasing it to get its money back. It is relying on the operator's revenue, and that revenue is precisely what the security package captures. Step-in protects the revenue if the operator fails, and it does not need an orbital registry to work.
Caelum is organised the way an Irish aircraft lessor is. Caelum Space Leasing Limited sits at the top as sponsor and servicer, and each satellite or ground station is held in its own Irish designated activity company, so every deal has its own vehicle, its own lenders and its own security. Each vehicle is designed to the Section 110 model; whether a particular vehicle qualifies is confirmed with Irish tax counsel deal by deal. What we offer operators is set out under services, and the case for investors on our investor page.
If the space protocol enters into force, registration would add an internationally recognised priority on top of the contractual package. A lease written today does not wait for that, because it was never built to depend on it.
Aircraft fleet figures from Aircraft Leasing Ireland data published by Ibec, 12/11/2025. Space protocol status per the UNIDROIT depositary record. Nothing here is legal, tax or investment advice.