Who owns the airplanes of an airline?

American Airlines for example has almost 1,600 airplanes in their fleet. Does that means there's someone out there that owns almost 1,600 jetliners?

The airline company owns it

American Airlines

The Boeing company makes the aircraft and American Airlines buys the airplanes from Boeing, so whatever aircraft American airlines is flying, they also own it. Also, after buying a airplane, American Airlines applies their own lettering decals and paints their own stripes on each of their airplanes. All other airlines do the same.

Another interesting fact, since most foreign countries do not produce aircraft, the foreign airlines companies buy second hand aircraft off of airline companies from the United States.

Most corporate airlines "own" their equipment. It is pretty unusual to lease it. That might have some sort of revolving debt that helped pay for the equipment, but the equipment is theirs to take care of and use as they see fit, within the constraints of the law, just as with most corporations and their assets.

The airlines own or lease their planes.

Usually they are leased and the leasing company or bank actually owns them.

It is really a matter of airline's preference and their financial resources. While some airlines own their aircraft, some prefer to lease them. Most airlines follow of hybrid strategy of owning part of the fleet and leasing the other part.

Leasing allows the airlines to get modern, fuel efficient aircraft quickly without big capital expense. This is especially attractive to low cost carriers such as easyJet or Spirit because their business strategy depends on flying the most fuel efficient aircraft and getting rid of them before they are due for expensive heavy maintenance. During economic downturns or if their expansion plans do not pan out the airlines can quickly downsize by returning the aircraft to lessors.

Over the last several decades because of the favorable tax environment Dublin, Ireland became a world-wide aircraft leasing hub. Every major lessor has either its headquarters or a regional offce there. Some leasing companies specialize in leasing large passenger aircraft, some spacialize in regional jets and turboprops, some specialize in used aircraft, and some are leasing freighters.

Today aircraft lessors control nearly half of world's aircraft order backlog and weld great influence with aircraft manufactures. When Steven Udvar-Hazy, then a chairman of International Lease Finance Corporation, a major aircraft lessor, criticized Airbus' proposed answer to Boeing 787, Airbus scrapped its plans, went back to the drawing board and came up with the A350, a much more credible competitor. Boeing had designed the 787 with the leasing companies in mind from the start. It offers customer a choice between the Rolls-Royce and General Electric engines, but the aircraft has a feature called a Common Engine Interface that allows one manufacturer's engine to be easily swapped for the other. This way a leasing company can offer an engine choice to the customer.

Some airlines prefer to own their fleets outright. Singapore Airlines owns its aircraft and disposes of them after ten years. In the 1993 it even set up an aircraft leasing arm to lease the airline's excess aircraft to other airlines. It 2007 it sold the leasing operation to Bank of China.

Some airlines may own some of their aircraft, while leasing others. American Airlines, for example, operated 35 Airbus A300s from 1988 to 2008, the airline owned 26 and leased 9. Air Canada sold several of its Boeing 787s upon taking delivery from the factory and leased them back. The transaction allowed the airline to preserve its capiatal while renewing its long range fleet. It also helped that Air Canada made about $18 million on the deal because of the great demand for the 787 production slots.

Most airlines are publicly traded companies, owned by the shareholders.
Most aircraft lessors are also publicly traded companies, so also owned by their shareholders.

They are generally leased. Nobody has that much spare cash lying around. So technically, the banks own them.

Actually, MOST major airlines don't OWN all the airplanes that carry their colors and brand name. Many of these aircraft are LEASED from commercial lenders, and the smaller airplanes that fly under brands like American Eagle or United Express are owned and operated by smaller, independent contractors.