CARISMA: Aircraft Cabin and Cabin Systems Refurbishing, Optimization of Technical Processes – market research for a completion center

Abstract

The need to modify the aircraft interior during its useful life has grown to an unprecedented level over the last years. For several reasons, airlines and aircraft owners are undertaking the retrofit of their airplanes in a shorter cycle than before. The future seems to belong to the type of work covering the entire process chain of a complete cabin conversion, outsourced by the aircraft manufacturer to what is called Completion Center. A completion center carries out the conversion of an aircraft starting from the customer request up to aircraft delivery. This technical note aims to investigate this emerging and growing market, and to forecast its evolution for the next 20 years. It is known that companies in cabin conversion and refurbishing are currently overbooked. Predicting the future of this tendency becomes a key factor in determining whether a business opportunity arises or other factors, like the present economical crisis, would increase the risk for the investors in this area. Small engineering offices subcontracting work in this field from large manufacturers are very interested to find out if growing into a Completion Center represents a business opportunity or not. This technical note identifies several meaningful cases and predicts the market volume and the world distribution for each of them: 1.) international cabins, 2.) domestic cabins, 3.) aircraft on operating lease, 4.) freighter conversions and 5.) VIP cabin modifications. This implies the determination of cabin modification/conversion scenarios, along with their duration and frequency. Factors driving the cabin conversion and refurbishing are identified. Several aircraft databases, containing the current world feet as well as the forecasted fleet for the next years, are analyzed. The results are obtained by creating a program able to read and analyze the gathered data. It is shown that about 38000 cabin redesigns will be undertaken within the next 20 years. About 2500 conversions from jetliners into freighters and 25000 cabin modifications at VIP standards will emerge on the market. The North American and European markets will keep providing good business opportunities in this area. The Asian market, however, is growing fast and its very strong influence on demand puts it in the front rank for the next 20 years.