Patrick Kearney has built a specialty at Apollo in buying and running airlines and packaging companies, working across both the equity and credit sides of the firm rather than staying confined to private equity, which let Apollo help finance Atlas Air when normal lending markets were closed. He was already thinking about combining Novolex with Pactiv when Apollo first looked at the Novolex deal, and he later became a board director at Sun Country, giving him direct oversight of an airline rather than just working on the deal from behind the scenes.