Wet Lease vs Dry Lease

Imagine renting a car for a road trip two different ways. In the first, you get just the vehicle, and you supply your own driver, fuel and insurance. In the second, you get the car complete with a professional driver, fuel already accounted for, and full insurance, essentially a chauffeured, fully serviced package. Dry lease and wet lease apply almost exactly this distinction to aircraft.

A dry lease is simply the aircraft itself, without crew, maintenance or insurance, all of which the leasing airline must supply on its own, using its own pilots, its own maintenance arrangements and its own insurance coverage. This is the more common, longer-term way airlines expand their fleets, essentially financing aircraft acquisition through leasing rather than outright purchase.

A wet lease, often called ACMI, Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance and Insurance, includes all of those elements bundled together, the leasing airline supplies a fully crewed, maintained and insured aircraft, and the airline receiving it simply operates it under its own flight numbers and branding, without needing its own crew or maintenance arrangements for that specific aircraft at all.

Wet leasing is typically a faster, more flexible, but more expensive solution used for short-term capacity needs, covering a sudden demand surge, bridging a gap while an airline's own newly ordered aircraft are delayed in delivery, or launching new routes quickly without the lead time dry-leased or purchased aircraft require, exactly the kind of flexibility Indian carriers have leaned on during periods of rapid, ambitious fleet expansion.

Whenever an Indian airline announces additional aircraft capacity on unusually short notice, faster than a new aircraft order or a standard dry lease could realistically be arranged, a wet lease is very often the mechanism behind that quick capacity addition, a temporary, fully serviced solution while longer-term fleet plans catch up.