Meggitt opts for a spread of interests, and it’s all on display at Le Bourget.
‘Never put all your eggs in the same basket’, goes the old saying. No danger of that with defence and aviation conglomerate Meggitt, which has more baskets than a Carrefour hypermarché.
The company is demonstrating its spread of interests by coming to Le Bourget with the regulatory process under way to acquire US brake specialists K&F Industries, a new aerial target and a method of cutting the cost of cockpit displays in the Boeing Apache Longbow combat helicopter.
Meggitt is a company with a low profile outside the industries in which it operates, but it does very nicely without a lot of publicity. Its 2006 financial results showed underlying profit before taxation of $261 million on a turnover of $1.324 billion – figures that many companies would kill for.
The group’s profit levels are “approaching an acceptable level”, says a smiling chief executive, Terry Twigger, who points to its exposure to civil and military markets, as well as the OEM and aftermarket sectors, as reasons for its success.
The biggest change on the immediate horizon is the acquisition of K&F Industries, a $1.8bn deal. K&F had 2006 sales of $424m and EBITDA profits of $168m, which should fit right in with the healthy margins enjoyed by the group as a whole.
K&F subsidiary Aircraft Braking Systems is a wheel and brake specialist that will fit in with Meggitt’s existing Dunlop Aerospace Braking Systems unit. “The technologies they deploy are complementary” says Twigger. “Dunlop was one of the original developers of carbon brakes and still has excellent technologies like anti-oxidation coatings. ABS is probably stronger in terms of steel brake technology.”
Although based at Bournemouth in southern England, the K&F acquisition will mean that around 65% of Meggitt’s business will be in the US.
One example of this is the secondary flight display system for the Apache Longbow. While the conventional approach to outfitting tandem cockpits is to use two secondary flights displays, with two sets of data sensors, Meggitt Avionics’ system uses a display repeater and draws identical data from a single set of sensors. Meggitt says it is the only supplier of repeaters to complement standby displays.
Meanwhile another unit, Meggitt Defence Systems (MDS), will be showing its GT-400 high-performance glide target, which is intended to bridge the gap between towed and free-flying targets.
With no engine to pay for and no need for the tracking system requirements or fully instrumented ranges required for jet-powered drones, costs are substantially lowered. “This is an important product now militaries are baulking at the cost of flying jet-powered targetry,” according to Ian Matyear of MDS.
The GT-400 system is already in service with France’s Aviation Defense Service target-towing company and the Royal Australian Air Force. The air-launched target, when released at 35,000ft (10,700m), will glide at between 250-400kt for around 20-50 miles (32-80km) on a pre-programmed flight profile.
Source: Flight Daily News
