Carlyle Aviation Partners Brand Guidelines: Apollo Aviation’s 2002 Miami Start, Now Carlyle

Two founders and a Miami office.

Carlyle Aviation Partners began as Apollo Aviation Group. It was founded in 2002 by Bill Hoffman and Robert Korn, according to a February 2025 ranking of aircraft lessors by the trade site AeroTime, which gives its headquarters as Miami, Florida. The same article says the company began by concentrating on mid-life aircraft and engine leasing, and grew from there through acquisitions and aircraft purchases.

That starting point shaped the business. An aircraft lessor buys jets and engines and rents them to airlines, usually on operating leases, so that a carrier can fly an aircraft without owning it. AeroTime also notes that Carlyle Aviation Partners does business in strategic financing for airlines, providing liquidity to carriers when they need it.

The present name comes from its owner. In a September 2020 note on private capital in aviation, the law firm Watson Farley & Williams listed “Carlyle’s investment in RPK and Apollo Aviation Group (now Carlyle Aviation Partners)” among its examples of private-equity firms that own aircraft lessors. The aviation business now carries the Carlyle name. The same note warns readers not to confuse Apollo Aviation Group with Apollo Global Management, a separate investment manager.

The note also explains why such owners were drawn to the sector. It describes private-equity firms as managers that raise money from institutions and individuals and invest it in businesses, and says they were early investors in aircraft leasing, with many of the lessors of 2020 then or previously owned by such funds.

A fleet counted by the trade press.

The size of the fleet is documented by trade rankings rather than by the company alone. In its February 2025 list of the largest lessors by fleet, AeroTime placed Carlyle Aviation Partners ninth, with 372 aircraft: 336 narrowbodies and 36 widebodies, many of the widebodies freighters. It said the company leased aircraft and engines to 111 airlines in 53 countries, named Ethiopian, SpiceJet, TAAG and Vietjet among its major customers, and gave the Boeing 737 Next Generation and the Boeing 777 as its most common narrowbody and widebody types.

A later table on English Wikipedia, citing the Aviation Leaders Report 2026 by Airline Economics and KPMG, also lists Carlyle Aviation Partners ninth, with a portfolio of 356 aircraft; in the same table AerCap is first, with 1,734. The two counts come from different sources and dates, and are given here as each source states them.

Individual deals show how the business works in practice. In February 2025 AeroTime reported that Air Greenland had signed a six-year lease with Carlyle Aviation, with an option to extend, for a single new Airbus A320neo. The agreement was signed on 14 February 2025, and the aircraft was due for delivery in December 2026 to fly a new route between Ilulissat, in the north of Greenland, and Copenhagen. The airline’s chief executive told AeroTime that delivery times for new Airbus aircraft were then six to seven years, so it had chosen to lease the jet to be ready when the new international airport at Ilulissat opened, and to keep financial flexibility on a new route. The leased A320neo would sit alongside the larger A330neo the airline already flew between Nuuk and the Danish capital, and SAS, which already maintained that A330-800, would service the new jet as well, the report said.

The same Watson Farley & Williams note puts the business in a wider pattern. It says private equity was an early investor in aircraft leasing and that many lessors are or were owned by such funds, giving as examples investments in Avolon, AerCap, Aircastle, Nordic Aviation Capital and Jackson Square, as well as Apollo Aviation Group.

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.

From Apollo to Carlyle, and FLY Leasing.

The largest step in the company’s growth was a takeover of another listed lessor. FLY Leasing was a Dublin-based aircraft leasing investment company, formerly listed on the New York Stock Exchange, whose leases were managed for it by the aircraft manager BBAM rather than by its own staff, according to English Wikipedia. In August 2021, the same article says, Carlyle Aviation Partners announced that it had completed the acquisition of FLY.

English Wikipedia describes FLY’s fleet as mostly Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 aircraft, and says the company itself had few employees because BBAM ran its leases day to day. The deal brought that Dublin portfolio into the Miami business.

The company’s name follows its owner’s, and the rest of its public record comes from trade rankings and lease announcements: a fleet count, a list of airline customers and a mix of narrowbodies, widebodies and freighters. The founders’ focus was mid-life aircraft and engines, according to AeroTime; the 2025 Air Greenland deal was for a new-build A320neo.

For a design guide, Carlyle Aviation Partners shows how a lessor can take its whole identity from an owner’s name and keep its own record through its fleet and its deals. Compare Castlelake, another investment firm with an aviation leasing business, and AerCap, first in the same fleet tables. For this guide we use a navy, a blue-grey and a sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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