ISTAT Jetrader - Spring 2021 - 24

great. And for those who are unable
to stay in the industry or are looking
to get into the industry, just remember
that aviation is highly cyclical. Don't
give up. Try to develop skills that
will make you attractive to potential
aviation-based employers or aviation
type employers.

Gerry Butler
Chief Marketing Officer at
Merx Aviation Finance
ISTAT President
*Aired on 9 December 2020

On how he got into the
aviation industry:
I grew up on the north side Dublin.
Dublin has now become the home of
aircraft leasing, and I went to a school
called Belvedere College in the city,
and then was educated after that at
University College Dublin. Little known
fact: I actually studied archaeology.
I wanted to be Indiana Jones, but I

back and joined Irish Life, which is
an insurance company here. I moved
around a few departments there and
ended up in the investment side of
things. By pure chance on the 28th of
December 2001, there was a reunion
among some old school friends at
a golf event in Wexford. After a few
generous helpings of Guinness, I
got talking to a friend named Barry
Flannery, who is now the CFO of
SMBC. He spoke to me about aviation
and what he did in aircraft finance.
Long story short is, after multiple
interviews, and even a plane down to
Shannon to meet Dómhnal Slattery
in April 2002, I joined what was then
Lombard Aviation Capital as a pricing
and credit analyst, which was soon to
become RBS Aviation Capital.
On what attracted him to ISTAT:
When I got on the board, ISTAT was
a very, very different group. It was
still on a progression. If you think
about it, we have 5,500 members;
in Europe, we were getting 500-600
members attending a conference;
we're now up to 2,000 people nearly
attending a conference. The one
thing that dawned on me when I
became ISTAT president - I had
these grand ideas about where
I wanted to take ISTAT. The one

If you're able to stay in the industry during these
turbulent times, just suck up as much as you can, because
you're going to learn so much, and you'll be able to use
that in the future.
realized that Tutankhamun was found
and there was no real gold floating
around in caves to hunt anymore. After
college, I went to play professional
hockey in Germany and Belgium. I did
that for a couple of years and came
24

* T H E O F F I C I A L P U B L I C AT I O N O F I S TAT

thing that Jep [Thornton], Marc
[Allinson], Doug [Runte] and a lot of
other people who I had side chats
with said, " You need to have an
action plan in place to hit the ground
running on day one, because your

term is only two years. If you're
thinking to do something and enact
it six or nine months down the road,
essentially your term is virtually
half over. You're never going to get
it done. "
I spent the prior year trying to
see where I wanted to take ISTAT
and where ISTAT would permit us to
go. There are three areas I wanted
to focus on, which were diversity
and inclusion; education; and Asia.
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) speaks
for itself; it's trying to broaden
our horizons and acknowledge the
deficiencies of our industry in terms
of D&I and to be able to try and
promote that in a much broader sense
and allow the platform that ISTAT is
to be able to bring that forward. On
education, it was about giving back.
How can we bring the next crop of
leaders through in ISTAT? How can
we educate them? There are all these
amazing stories and talent that has
run through the 1970s to the 2020s.
A lot of those people are slowly going
to go off into the sunset. How can
we access the real brain trust of our
industry? How can we get them into
a room with younger people and be
able to push their ideas, concepts,
stories and legacies to these younger
folks? The other side is Asia. We are
so far underserved in terms of Asia.
Naturally, ISTAT has been totally
focused originally on the United States
first, then on Europe, and the next
big focus should really be on Asia.
There was a big push, and still is a
big push, in trying to develop ISTAT,
particularly in China, but also in other
areas of Asia, such as Hong Kong,
Singapore and Tokyo, where we have
a very strong core group of aviation
finance professionals.
When I took over, we were
focused on those three ideas, and
I think we made massive strides in
the first 12 months. And then COVID
happened, and, as with anything in
the world and our industry, we've
had the challenge of no conferences;
ISTAT Jetrader - Spring 2021

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