Steven Udvar-Hazy, who left International Lease Finance Corporation in February, is seeking capital for a “huge” new aircraft lessor, Air Lease Corporation, that he is setting up with his former colleague John Plueger.

“We’re in a quiet period so I can’t talk, but it won’t be much longer,” the 64-year-old Hungarian-born entrepreneur told Bloomberg News at the sidelines of a conference in New York yesterday. “It’ll be huge,” Udvar-Hazy said when asked how big the company will be.

He has been planning to buy back parts of ILFC for some time. He founded the company in Los Angeles more than three decades ago and built ILFC into the world’s largest plane leasing company and the biggest customer for Boeing and Airbus before selling it to the insurer American International Group in 1990.

Udvar-Hazy stepped down as chief executive of ILFC more than a year after it lost funding options because of credit downgrades to its parent AIG, which nearly collapsed in 2008 and had to be bailed out by the US government.

Plueger, who was ILFC’s chief operating officer at the time, replaced him temporarily as CEO before leaving in March to rejoin Hazy. Plueger’s departure last moth immediately sparked speculation that he would set up a new aircraft leasing venture with his former boss.

Before 2008, a leasing company could have been started with a 4-to-1 or 5-to-1 ratio of debt to equity, said Udvar-Hazy. Greater difficulty in obtaining credit in today’s climate means that every dollar of equity invested in a new leasing enterprise could expect to attract 2.5 times that in bank debt or bonds.

“The last financial nightmare taught us a lesson,” Udvar- Hazy told bankers, lessors, airline executives and other aircraft finance executives at Euromoney’s Airfinance conference. “In the heyday, you could stretch it to 4- or 5-1” of debt to equity, he said. “Now it would be better to be 2.5 to 3-to-1.”