Willis Lease Finance Brand Guidelines: A 1985 Engine Lessor From Coconut Creek to Teesside

A leasing company built around the spare engine.

Willis Lease Finance Corporation is an aviation lessor built around jet engines rather than whole airliners. The company dates its start to 1985, when it was set up by Charles F. Willis IV, who remains its founder and executive chairman; English Wikipedia also records him as the founder of the business. The company says he started it with what it calls the then new and radical idea of leasing jet engines to commercial airlines, and it describes itself as the first to lease jet engines to commercial operators.

The company’s pitch to airlines is that a leased engine keeps an aircraft in service while its own engines are maintained, and it offers round-the-clock support for aircraft on the ground. Its website says that, unlike many aircraft and engine lessors, it does much more short-term leasing, which keeps it in close and regular contact with airlines.

According to the company’s own timeline, Willis went public in 1996, ordered more than 45 CFM56 engines in 2006 and formed a Dublin joint venture with Mitsui & Co. in 2011. Charles F. Willis IV served as chief executive, president and a director from the company’s incorporation in 1985 until April 2022, when he became executive chairman and Austin C. Willis became chief executive, the company says. It adds that Austin Willis also took the title of president in July 2026.

The brand on the company’s own pages is often shortened to WLFC, the initials it uses in its web address and in its headings. The older willislease.com address now forwards to the newer site.

Leases, pools, parts and repair shops.

Leasing is still the core. The company describes itself as the largest independent lessor of commercial aircraft jet engines, and says it offers engine types from all major manufacturers, engine pools, engine financing, sale-and-leaseback deals, forward purchases, finance leases and engine management. It also says its North American CFM56-7B Engine Sharing Pool serves more than 600 aircraft. Two named programmes stand out on its website: ConstantAccess, which gives customers on-demand access to leased engines, and ConstantThrust, under which Willis swaps a removed engine for a serviceable one from its own stock.

Around that core the company has added services, step by step, according to its timeline. In 2013 it bought the assets of JT Power and launched Willis Aeronautical Services, a parts business now based in Pompano Beach, Florida. In 2014 it set up a joint venture with China Aviation Supplies. In 2016 it acquired TES and established Willis Asset Management. In 2018 it opened the Willis Engine Repair Centre in Bridgend, Wales, followed in 2019 by a US repair centre, which its contact page places at the company’s Coconut Creek headquarters. Its services page describes both as EASA and FAA Part 145 shops.

The newest layer is financial. Willis Aviation Capital, which the company calls its asset management and investment platform, oversees the existing joint ventures with Mitsui & Co. and China Aviation Supplies and, the company says, has set up aviation investment platforms with Liberty Mutual Investments and Blackstone Credit & Insurance. In 2023 the company formed Willis Sustainable Fuels to develop aviation fuel projects, and in 2025 it exercised options for 30 LEAP engines from CFM International, its timeline says.

On the website these businesses sit under three headings: Willis Lease, Willis Aviation Capital and Willis Services.

How aircraft 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 Florida to a hangar in the north of England.

Willis is based in Coconut Creek, Florida, where its contact and investor pages give its corporate headquarters, and it lists offices in Dublin, Blagnac near Toulouse, Singapore and Bridgend, Wales. One of its European sites is in the north of England. On 15 May 2020 The Northern Echo reported that Willis Asset Management, a Florida-headquartered business, had leased space at Teesside International Airport to house aircraft and parts and to carry out maintenance and storage for commercial aircraft, with about 20 jobs in the first phase and two hangars in the deal. English Wikipedia also records Willis Lease Finance Corporation as a new airport tenant from that date.

The site grew. On 18 July 2022 The Northern Echo reported that Willis Lease Finance and its subsidiary Willis Aviation Services had started planning a new aircraft maintenance facility, had taken over the airport’s Jet Centre, renamed Jet Centre by Willis, and planned maintenance hangars on 13 acres of land within the Teesside Freeport, with 200 jobs expected. The paper said the subsidiary already leased Hangar 2 for aircraft maintenance, storage and disassembly. The company’s services page now lists base and line maintenance, modifications, parking and storage, disassembly and painting at Teesside for A320 family and Boeing 737NG aircraft, with A320neo work listed as coming in 2026.

For a design guide, Willis Lease Finance shows how a specialist lessor can build a brand around a component rather than a whole aircraft, with a family of “Willis” names for each service. Compare Air Lease, another US lessor, and Aircastle. For this guide we use a hangar navy, a steel blue and a brass accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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