Centres struggle to meet VIP widebody demand

Burgeoning executive market expected to see new players compete for business

Leading completion centres are battling to add capacity to meet the unprecedented demand for widebody business jets and VIP airliner interiors.

Walter Heerdt, senior vice-president for sales and marketing at Germany's Lufthansa Technik (LHT), said at EBACE that the recent round of widebody orders announced at the show underlined the fact that the VIP market was reaching new peaks.

"We expect to see 18-20 widebodies - Boeing 747-8s and 787-8/9s, Airbus A330s, A340s, even an A380 - coming on to the global completions market between now and 2015," he says. "I see this level of activity being sustained in the longer term rather than peaking for two or three years, and this adds up to a shortage of capacity."

To cater for this demand, LHT, which is completing a 13th 747 at its Hamburg facility, is adding a second widebody completion line in 2009 and the company has not ruled out establishing another facility elsewhere, says Heerdt.

Its rival, Jet Aviation, is about to break ground for a new widebody hangar, scheduled for completion early next year. It will add almost 35,000m2 (377,000ft2) of space to the company's Basle facility and will be big enough to house an A380 and a 787-8 simultaneously.

Boeing Business Jets president Steve Hill says strong growth in the number of people with very high levels of personal wealth was driving up demand for VIP aircraft. He expects a number of new players to break into the market in the coming years to take up the slack from the handful of widebody completion experts, including LHT and Jet Aviation in Europe and Associated Air Center and Gore Design Completions in the USA.

Heerdt and Jet Aviation's newly appointed chief executive, Peter Edwards, cautioned against this approach. "You can put a hangar up anywhere," says Edwards. "Acquiring the capability of people is harder. This is a challenging business and barriers to entry are quite high. There will continue to be pressure to open new facilities, but the market has to be extremely careful that new facilities without track records can execute to customers' satisfaction."

To reduce completion and delivery times for its growing customer base, Airbus has appointed Stork Fokker of the Netherlands as an additional completion centre and is reviving the defunct company-owned Sogerma centre. The new facility, dubbed Airbus Corporate Jet Centre and based at Airbus' headquarters in Toulouse, will be independently managed and initial plans call for the completion of three Airbus VIP aircraft per year.

Source: Flight International