"My father forced me to learn to fly," he said. Popovich began his career in aviation as a commercial airline pilot, but the job wasn't for him. "You're seeing a lot more problems overseas in general aviation now." "Right now we're doing jobs in Alaska, Columbia, Chile, Portugal and Iceland," Popovich said. Sage-Popovich is a licensed appraisal firm that does valuation for more than 200 companies, including American Airlines and other major airlines. In 1986, Sage-Popovich diversified its services to include consulting, technical services, asset management, expert witnessing and part sales. The business really took off after the Chernobyl disaster took a major toll on transatlantic air travel and the lease-return business took off. Kitts in the Caribbean, doing a favor for the company's banker by repossessing two 747s that an airline in Sri Lanka defaulted on. Popovich founded the company in 1979 after starting an airline in St. I asked where he got a name, and it was from an unsecured creditor in the Alaska case." We're working a bankruptcy in Alaska where they're winding the airline down and just got a call from an attorney in Texas.
"We grew mostly just by reputation and word of mouth. "We've got quite a reputation for doing what nobody else could do," Popovich said. bankruptcy courts as a liquidator and federal courts as a binding arbiter in aircraft-related litigation, often relying on word of mouth to land its next gig. The firm works all over the country with U.S. Sage-Popovich has repossessed planes on every continent but Antarctica, recovering everything from general aviation planes to 747s owned by failed airlines to an entire fleet of 233 helicopters - even once repossessing a plane owned by the president of the Congo. Popovich can regale you for hours with artfully told tales of jobs that range from the humorous to the bizarre and are packed with pathos, larceny and thrills." His adventures would make fine fodder for the silver screen. "For more than 30 years, when a banker anywhere in the world has had an aviation loan or lease that was circling the bowl, Popovich has often been the go-to guy. He drives a Bentley, breeds thoroughbred Rocky Mountain horses and enjoys fine cigars," Mark Huber wrote for the trade publication Business Jet Traveler. He runs a far-flung global aviation business, Sage-Popovich, from his 120-acre ranch near Valparaiso, Ind. But he also has a keen understanding of geopolitics, international finance and commercial trends. "Nick Popovich looks like a bouncer and can talk like a longshoreman. Fortune magazine called him a "king of airline repossession."
Airplane repo series#
Sage-Popovich was featured in the "Airplane Repo" reality television series that ran on the Discovery Channel for three seasons and has garnered international press coverage, including from Smithsonian Air and Space magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and the London Sunday Mail. I was looking around the room, wondering how I got there."
I've never landed a plane in the Hudson River. "It was a little strange being there with astronauts," Popovich said of his induction. He also was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation, whose members include Frank Borman, Buzz Aldrin, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise and Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Popovich, the founder and president of Sage-Popovich, is being inducted into the Northwest Indiana Business & Industry Hall of Fame, and it's not the only hall of fame he's been enshrined in. "Fortunately, no one's been willing to pull the trigger over an aircraft," he said. Popovich has stared down the barrel of a gun more than once. "If that didn't happen, I'd probably still be there today." "They just opened all the jail cells," he said. He spent seven days there before, by an incredible stroke of good fortune, a popular uprising overthrew the dictator "Baby Doc" Jean-Claude Duvalier. Popovich was thrown into a crammed Haitian prison with a dirt floor. The airport had demanded $1 million for storing the plane for months, terms the bank had not agreed to. In 1986, for instance, Popovich said he was seized by Haitian troops, who shot at and bayoneted the engine of a plane he was trying to repossess for a bank in Port-au-Prince. Sage-Popovich, an aviation consulting and asset management firm headquartered in Valparaiso with a hangar at the Gary/Chicago International Airport, soared to great heights of success in a sometimes dangerous line of work, where defaulters often don't want to part with their plane. Nick Popovich has piloted a global aviation business that, since its founding in 1979, has repossessed more than 1,800 planes and helicopters, valued at more than $40 billion in aircraft and parts, from locations around the globe.