Skift Power Rankings: Steven Udvar-Hazy

Aircraft leasing opened up a whole new world for the airline industry, and it came from one of the most innovative minds in the business: Steven Udvar-Hazy, the executive chairman and founder of Air Lease and International Lease Finance Corporation.

Through leasing, airlines that couldn’t afford to buy jets could now operate them in a more affordable way. 

“Many airlines around the world owe their existence to Steve Udvar-Hazy and were pleased that he was around when they needed him to be there,” Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association, told Aviation Week last year.

After fleeing Hungary during the Soviet Union’s crackdown on the nation’s revolution in 1956, his family settled in Sweden, where he spent much of his time watching airplanes take off at Stockholm airport. Once Udvar-Hazy’s family made it to New York, he spent time at LaGuardia and JFK, then called Idlewild Airport. 

Udvar-Hazy started brokering aircraft leases while he was still a student at UCLA — he was just 22 years old. 

Udvar-Hazy has become an influential voice in the airline industry. Everyone stops and listens to what he has to say. Even in his late 70s, Udvar-Hazy still has a pulse on the industry and doesn’t hold back.  

At the 2023 Skift Aviation Forum, he advised carriers not to grow too fast and order too many planes, even as airlines cast record orders for aircraft coming out of the pandemic. 

“Generally, their eyes are bigger than their stomachs, so they order more than they can really absorb financially, strategically, and also in terms of infrastructure.”

More recently at a Wings Club event in New York, he ripped into China’s plane maker, COMAC, which is hoping to eventually become a big competitor to Boeing and Airbus. 

“The CCP and COMAC are very interested in selling the C919,” he said. “But it’s a one-way dating relationship.”

Steven Udvar-Hazy at Skift Aviation Forum