The Aircraft Protocol to the Cape Town Convention on Aircraft Financing: A Civil Lawyer's Perspective

The coming into force in March 2006 of the Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment ("Cape Town Convention") and its protocol related to aircraft equipment ("Aircraft Protocol") established a new international legal regime to facilitate the cross boarder financing of mobile equipment in general and aircraft frames and engines in particular. The implementation of a new legal regime inevitably brings with it a transitional period of uncertainty. Legal and business actors need time and experience to fully assimilate the new framework. The transitional challenge is magnified exponentially when the vehicle of reform is an international convention intended to have global scope. The wide diversity of legal traditions and business practices among States make the assimilation process particularly challenging. The challenge is even more acute in the case of the Cape Town Convention and Aircraft Protocol. These instruments straddle property, civil procedure, creditor and insolvency laws, areas of private law which traditionally have been particularly resistant to global harmonization efforts. In addition, the Convention establishes a new global institution---an international property rights registry---the first such attempt in private law.;This thesis has three intertwined goals. The first is to show that the Cape Town Convention and Aircraft Protocol are not neutral to legal tradition. Rather, they are primarily rooted in the statutory regimes adopted by the common law states and provinces of the United States and Canada over the latter half of the twentieth century. Secondly, this thesis seeks to ease the transition challenge this presents for civil law lawyers by giving a comparative overview of the Convention and Protocol which takes into account those aspects which civil law jurists may have difficulties in understanding. The third and final goal of this thesis is to contribute a deeper substantive understanding of the Convention and Protocol to the existing literature, much of which to date has been concerned---understandably---with general or preliminary implementation issues.