New York · Widebody aircraft placement
Most of the fleet is already ineligible.
Fulcrum is a placement intermediary for widebody aircraft. We act for owners and lessors, screening fleets against a requirement’s binding constraints, then assembling the technical offer that survives them.
Gate 01 · engine type
| Result | Operator | Engine | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fail | Norse Atlantic | 12 | Trent 1000 TEN | FAIL |
| Fail | British Airways | n/a | Trent 1000 | FAIL |
| Fail | ANA | n/a | Trent 1000 | FAIL |
| Fail | Virgin Atlantic | n/a | Trent 1000 | FAIL |
| Pass | Etihad Airways | 37 | GEnx-1B | PASS |
| Pass | Oman Air | 10 | GEnx-1B | PASS |
| Pass | United Airlines | n/a | GEnx-1B | PASS |
- 518
- 150
- 25
- 7.2
What we do
We work one side of the table.
An owner or lessor appoints us under written mandate. We screen the fleet against a specific requirement, say which aircraft can actually clear it, and build the technical submission. They bid in their own name and keep the relationship. We never sit on both sides of the same transaction.
Screening
Scoring
Bid assembly
Submission
Method
The screen comes first.
Most placement work starts with commercial terms. We start with the asset, because in a structured tender the asset decides more of the outcome than the negotiation does. Screening runs as an ordered cascade. Each gate eliminates, cheapest first.
- 01
Engine
Type and thrust rating, from the dataplate.
- 02
Airframe
Gross weight, cabin configuration, seat count.
- 03
Maintenance status
Nothing heavy falling due inside the protected window.
- 04
Engine condition
Cycles since new, life-limited parts, on-wing margin.
- 05
Records
Repairs, back-to-birth traceability, damage history.
- 06
Availability
Lease expiry against the delivery window.
Proof of work
What four lines of arithmetic are worth.
Structured tenders publish how they will score you. Almost nobody does the division. Here is a real example, worked from the document, and what reading it carefully was worth to an owner.
Worked example · published tender, 2026
What the tender published
A national carrier put three wide-body aircraft out to a six-year lease. Like most structured tenders it scored bidders on two separate axes, the aircraft and the money, then weighted them. Both formulae were printed in the document.
Read together: everything about the aircraft is capped at a quarter of the result. Three quarters is money.
Where bidders stop reading
150 of those 518 points are awarded for taking the aircraft back at the end of the lease “as is, where is”. In plain terms, the owner absorbs the engine and airframe condition that six years of flying consumed, without compensation. At the utilisation the tender itself assumes, that is roughly 24,000 hours and 5,300 cycles of wear.
It is an eight-figure exposure per aircraft. Most owners read 150, price it, and decline to bid at all. That carrier has now failed to attract a bid five rounds running.
What the 150 points are actually worth
| Points attached to redelivery | 150pts | |
| ÷ | Maximum technical score | 518pts |
| = | Share of the technical score | 28.96% |
| × | Weight technical carries in the award | 25% |
| = | Cost of refusing all of it | 7.24pts |
What that means for an owner
Seven points of a hundred. An owner can decline every redelivery concession, keep the maintenance value it was being asked to give away, and lose about seven points, on an award where three quarters of the score is price. Keener rent buys those points back.
The difference between a requirement that looks unbiddable and one that is merely aggressive is four lines of arithmetic on a document anyone could download. This is the work.
Independence
One side, and how we are paid.
Our fee is paid by the owner or lessor who appoints us, on success, and is disclosed to both sides. We hold no aircraft and take no positions. We have no joint ventures, no affiliations, and no interests that could put us on the other side of a client’s trade.
We are not a lessor and do not present ourselves as one. Our principals spent their careers on the airline side of this business, which is disclosed openly on our people page along with the recusals that follow from it.
Compliance
Written down, before any work starts.
Many airlines in this market are state-owned, which makes their staff foreign officials under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. For a counterparty assessing risk, how an intermediary behaves is not fine print. These are the rules we work under.
- A written mandate before any work begins.
- Agency disclosed to both sides.
- Fee paid by the appointing party, and only by them.
- No payment of any kind to anyone connected with a government counterparty.
- Sanctions and OFAC screening on every counterparty.
- Tender channels used exactly as published, never an unsolicited approach.
People
The firm is new. The people are not.
Fulcrum has no corporate track record and will not manufacture one. What it has is thirty years spent inside a national flag carrier, at General Manager level across five divisions, and a method you can inspect on this site and judge for yourself.
That history sits on the airline side of the table rather than ours, so we publish it in full, together with the recusals that follow from it.
Contact
Talk to us directly.
If you own or manage widebody aircraft and want to know which of them can clear a specific requirement, that is the conversation to start with. No fee unless an aircraft is placed.
infobd@fulcrumtriad.com