Monday morning I thought we had lost another airline analyst as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. And not just any airline analyst — Gary Chase. Gary, who is a former Institutional Investor “Star” analyst and Dave Fintzen, his trusty associate, had packed up their belongings and were waiting their turn to run the gauntlet of news hounds outside the doors of their employer the last time we heard from them.

But as Scarlett said, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Today, a deal in which Barclay’s bank will take over the more profitable chunks of the bankrupt investment bank was revealed, and voila! It looks like there was no need for Gary and Dave to pack up their belongings in banker’s boxes after all.

According to a note from Gary this morning,

“The last few days have been a roller coaster ride (not the fun kind). We knew things were fluid, but we didn’t think they’d be this fluid. As late as yesterday in the afternoon, we really thought that twelve years and, more importantly, that the collective efforts of a group of people we had tremendous pride in had come to an abrupt end. Today, we’re very excited to be back in business with Barclays behind us.

We very much appreciate all the support and concern many of you expressed. It made a very difficult situation easier to take and we can’t thank you enough.”

Meanwhile, today Wall Street had a lot to digest. The biggest piece of news was, of course, the fact that the Federal Government — yes, that means you and me — has loaned mega-insurance behemoth AIG $85 billion in an attempt to give the company some time to get its affairs in order.

As I wrote this weekend in PBB, one of the things the company will probably try to do is divest itself of a number of its subsidiaries, and one of those companies is airline leasing giant ILFC.

The problem with this is that it’s going to have to be one heck of a huge company.

One of the reasons that ILFC thrived as a part of AIG is that the company could lean on AIG’s massive financial clout in getting much better than market rates on financing deals.

This is the same business model that GECAS uses — as it depends on Daddy General Electric to serve basically the same purpose.

But those days are now gone. Today, the financial arm of GE is the part of the company that is dragging the rest of the company down, and in the case of AIG, the company is now being forced to look at its assets from a “what ones can we extract the most premium from” perspective.

And clearly ILFC is one of those potential jewels in the sell-off bag.