About

Irish-qualified lawyer Peter Plunkett joined the Dublin offices of Aircastle as senior legal counsel and managing director in 2006, and moved to Singapore in 2012 to develop the company’s Asia Pacific office. Plunkett began his legal career at Arthur Cox in Dublin, where he says he gained ‘almost unlimited exposure to top-drawer legal professionals in a highly driven environment [that] taught me how to do things’. In 1992 he joined GPA Group, then the pre-eminent aircraft leasing company in the world, and worked in a variety of aircraft financing legal roles. GPA’s decision to float on the stock market just as the aviation sector was undergoing a downturn in 1992 led to a failed initial public offering and created what Plunkett describes as a ‘highly pressurised’ environment at the company. However, Plunkett says, this experience was ‘central in honing my problem-solving skills, both in a transaction execution context and in my wider role. My time at GPA taught me how to get things done’. While already experienced in the aircraft leasing space, Plunkett says his time at Aircastle was critical to his development: ‘It allowed me to take more responsibility and ownership of matters under my watch, including management of a team in Dublin and latterly, Singapore’. Aircastle has helped shape Plunkett’s approach to working in-house, and he in turn has helped shape the organisation’s legal function ‘so that it is central to the business and technical decision-making process in the company as well as [a legal division]. This is of critical importance in an asset finance environment, where all functions have to be pro-actively involved with the optimisation of the asset values and the related transactions’.