Watson Farley & Williams (“WFW”) is pleased to announce that London Assets and Structured Finance Partner Dominic Pearson has contributed to the 5th Edition of Aircraft Financing, penning a chapter on the Global Aircraft Trading System (“GATS”) for the highly prestigious publication.
Aircraft Financing is the leading text and essential tool for those involved in aircraft financing transactions, providing expert guidance on all available funding options, the best ways to secure funding and how to ensure that robust legal structures framing commercial deals are in place.
The fifth edition – which is released 24 February 2022 – features a chapter on GATS for the very first time. Having worked closely with the Aviation Working Group (“AWG”) and with Fexco, who developed and operates the platform on AWG’s behalf, Dominic played a pivotal role in both the design and build of the GATS platform and the drafting of the GATS standard form documentation.
Dominic’s chapter covers a summary of the benefits of GATS as a new and more efficient system for trading aircraft, its legal framework and an overview of the platform, including its innovative use of digital signature technology.
Dominic commented: “It was a pleasure to contribute to the latest edition of Aircraft Financing and provide an overview of GATS, a project I have been involved in now for a number of years. No other firm has the same depth and breadth of knowledge of GATS or the GATS platform, and being asked to share that knowledge in a leading aviation publication is indicative of our first-class reputation advising the sector worldwide”.
This represents yet another success for Dominic and the WFW Aviation team in thought leadership in the sector after the successful launch of the firm’s online interactive legal analytics tool, the Global Aviation Restructuring Index – or GARI – in October 2021. Available to all participants in the aviation industry, GARI provides a comparative index of 55+ restructuring procedures available in 30 key aviation jurisdictions and assigns debtor and creditor ‘friendliness’ scores to complex restructuring procedures to make high-level comparisons easy to digest.
The book is available to order here.