Fleet Financing and Capital Structure Strategies in the Global Airline Industry

Abstract

This article develops an integrative decision framework for fleet financing and capital structure in global airlines. The review addresses three linked problems: fragmented measurement, weak treatment of uncertainty, and the separation of commercial financing decisions from risk governance. A structured narrative synthesis draws on finance, analytics, technology, operations, governance, and sector-specific literature, including sources on airline-specific risk, treasury architecture, capital project governance, and financial-reporting transparency. The resulting framework organizes evidence across six linked dimensions, fleet strategy, lease versus ownership, currency exposure, residual value, liquidity, and cycle resilience, treating adjacent dimensions as joint constraints rather than independent choices. It defines resilient fleet economics as the focal decision criterion and proposes a sequence of data definition, baseline construction, causal or comparative estimation, risk adjustment, scenario testing, governance review, and post-implementation learning. The analysis shows that isolated efficiency or revenue measures are insufficient because they omit implementation costs, tail losses, customer effects, and timing, and that this omission is compounded when financing decisions are evaluated separately from the currency, liquidity, and governance exposures they create. The article contributes a reusable architecture linking economic evaluation with accountable execution, together with twelve falsifiable research propositions, defined measurement fields, validation tests, and reporting practices suitable for empirical testing. The study uses no confidential company data and makes no causal claims about named employers.