Aviation Capital Group Brand Guidelines: Newport Beach 1989, Pacific Life & Tokyo Century

A Californian lessor and an insurer’s backing.

Aviation Capital Group, usually shortened to ACG, is an aircraft lessor based in Newport Beach, California. The company says it was founded in 1989 and has been headquartered in Newport Beach since then; in June 2026 it moved its head office within the city to a new building. It also lists offices in Dublin, Singapore and Miami, and representatives in Spain, Shanghai and the United Kingdom.

For much of its history ACG belonged to an insurer. Its own timeline records an initial equity investment by Pacific Life in 1996, and a December 2017 announcement described ACG as an indirect majority-owned subsidiary of Pacific Life Insurance Company, which said it had offered insurance since 1868.

The timeline then marks the steps of a growing lessor. In 2005 ACG bought Boullioun Aviation Services, and in 2006 it placed its first order for new aircraft, for 29 Boeing 737-800s. An Airbus sales executive, quoted in ACG’s October 2026 order announcement, dated the partnership to 2007, when ACG placed its first order with Airbus. ACG set up a Singapore office in 2008 and an Irish company in 2014. Later entries record first deliveries of new types: the Boeing 787 and 737 MAX and the Airbus A321neo in 2018, the A350 in 2019 and the A220 in 2021.

When Forbes previewed Aircastle’s share offering in August 2006, it listed Aviation Capital Group among the newcomer’s major competitors, alongside names such as AerCap and International Lease Finance.

From Pacific Life to Tokyo Century, and a share for ITOCHU.

Ownership moved to Japan in two steps. On 11 December 2017 ACG announced that Pacific Life had closed a transaction giving Tokyo Century Corporation, the Tokyo-listed leasing group, a 20% interest in ACG, with Pacific Life keeping control. Tokyo Century later raised its stake to 24.5%. On 5 December 2019 ACG announced that Tokyo Century had acquired the remaining interest, a deal first announced on 9 September 2019, making ACG a wholly owned subsidiary. AeroTime gave the same sequence in August 2026: a 20% stake in 2017 and the rest in 2019.

A second Japanese owner is on the way. AeroTime reported on 4 August 2026 that the trading house ITOCHU and Tokyo Century had signed an initial agreement on 3 August for ITOCHU to buy half of TC Skyward Aviation U.S., the Tokyo Century company that controls ACG, with Tokyo Century keeping the other half. ACG says the two companies signed a definitive sale and purchase agreement on 2 September 2026 and that the transaction is expected to close in November 2026, subject to conditions including regulatory approvals. At the time of writing it had not been completed; once it is, ACG will be jointly owned by Tokyo Century and ITOCHU.

AeroTime reported that ITOCHU plans to make ACG the main platform for its aerospace business and that the partners intend to grow its new-aircraft leasing, increase purchases and sales, and look at related areas such as maintenance, engine leasing and used parts. In figures presented by Tokyo Century, the same report said, ACG ranked ninth among aircraft lessors by fleet size, and Tokyo Century wants it to reach the top five.

How lessors present themselves.

Aircraft lessors sell nothing to the travelling public. They buy commercial jets, lease them to airlines and sell them on, so their identities are built for airlines, lenders and investors rather than passengers. Their websites tend to open with a short line of figures — aircraft owned and managed, airline customers, countries — dated to the end of a reporting quarter, as Aircastle and Aviation Capital Group both do.

The aircraft themselves carry other companies’ colours. A lessor’s jet flies in its customer’s livery, so the photographs on lessors’ sites and in their press releases show airlines’ paint schemes rather than the lessor’s own. Aviation Capital Group announced in September 2026, for example, that it had delivered the first Boeing 737-8 in Trinity Airways’ new identity. Fleet pages list aircraft by type, and order-book pages count commitments from the manufacturers years ahead.

Customer pages are often walls of airline logos, sometimes grouped by region, and services pages explain the business in plain terms: operating leases, sale-and-leaseback deals in which a lessor buys an airline’s new aircraft and leases it back, trading in mid-life aircraft, and managing aircraft for other owners. Engines are a business of their own; trade reports describe lessors balancing engine use across their fleets, and some groups plan to expand into engine leasing.

Many of these companies are owned by banks, trading houses or investment firms, and their investor pages — results, fact sheets, credit ratings and bond reports — carry as much weight as the leasing pages. For the guides in this group we use navy, teal and silver tones with sans and serif stand-ins, an unofficial interpretation chosen for a finance-led sector; no company’s logo, livery or photograph is reproduced.

Narrow-bodies, an order book and customer liveries.

ACG’s fleet is built around narrow-body jets. Its portfolio page says the owned fleet is predominantly Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 family aircraft, bought from the manufacturers, from airlines and from other owners. AeroTime, citing figures for the end of 2025, gave 446 owned, managed and committed aircraft — 278 owned, 33 managed and 135 on order — with about 94% of the fleet narrow-body. ACG put the total at 494 on 30 September 2026, and says it leases to roughly 85 airlines in about 50 countries.

The order book is the centre of its news. In October 2026 ACG finalised an order with Airbus for 75 A320neo family aircraft, due between 2032 and 2035, which it calls the largest order in its history. It also describes itself as a launch customer for the Boeing 737-10, the largest 737 MAX, with 63 on order, and said in October 2026 that its first one is scheduled for WestJet.

The services page lists four lines: operating leases; an Aircraft Financing Solutions programme, set up in March 2018, under which ACG guarantees or lends into an airline’s own aircraft financing; trading, including sales of mid-life aircraft and, at the end of their lives, freighter conversion or part-out; and asset management for aircraft owned by others. Sale-and-leaseback is part of the mix: in August 2026 ACG delivered the first of four A321neos to Wizz Air under such a deal.

Some of its press releases centre on an airline’s livery. In September 2026 ACG delivered a Boeing 737-8 to Trinity Airways, formerly T’way Air, which ACG says was the first aircraft to enter service in that airline’s new grey and rose-gold identity. The customers page sorts its airlines by region, from Aegean to Wizz Air.

For a design guide, Aviation Capital Group shows how a lessor tells its story through owners, orders and other companies’ paint schemes. Compare Air Lease, another Southern California lessor, and ORIX Aviation, a lessor with a Japanese parent. For this guide we use teal, blue and silver with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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