Cabin Fervor

New market forces are shaping the once-staid realm of cabin interiors, sparking a slew of new services and product offerings.

Boeing 787 delivery delays and the yet-to-fly A350 have created a bit of a cabin chasm for carriers. “They’re facing the need to find alternatives before their [current crop] of aircraft are replaced,” says Jean-Jacques Michel, senior VP of engineering and aircraft modification for Air France Industries KLM Engineering & Maintenance. “They’re in a situation where some of [their present] kitting becomes totally obsolete.”

Consolidation adds impetus to interior initiatives. “You’ve got some major airlines that are coming together,” says Ron Eaton, VP of AAR Engineering Services. Consider the recent roster: Delta/Northwest, United/Continental, Southwest/AirTran. “There’s a lot of work that ends up being required with regard to standardization and upgrades from an aircraft interiors perspective.”

The confluence of the two forces—delayed deliveries and consolidation—creates a nagging need to reconfigure, or at the very least restore, a legion of interiors in the near future.

The Integrator Argument

So demanding is the market now that a number of major companies offer what amounts to turn-key interior alternatives. “It’s the capacity to assume full responsibility for the aircraft’s cabin modification,” says Michel. This includes all the engineering…and also the completion.”

This soup-to-nuts approach mandates flexibility and responsiveness. In some instances, it means spinning off functional units. “Two years ago, engineering and aircraft modification [were] separated from general aircraft maintenance,” says AFI KLM E&M’s senior VP. The aim: render the process more responsive, more agile.

Sometimes, better responsiveness entails integration instead. At AAR, project integration takes place independently of mods. AAR takes care of engineering and paperwork up front, says Eaton, “coordinating with the FAA…[or] the foreign regulatory authority.” Then, it designs and assembles a parts kit, [providing] “engineering liaison on site.”

“On site” means precisely that. A significant slice of AAR Aircraft Services’ growth is in Asia. A dozen people work out of the firm’s Singapore office. Integration is tough to implement by remote control. The company’s Singapore presence enables the company “to build a better rapport with customers in that part of the world,” says Eaton. “It’s been a huge benefit for us.”

If it’s difficult to integrate complex interior packages from afar, it’s inherently impossible to do so without extensive pre-planning.

“We work very hard…determining roles and responsibilities before a job starts,” says Andy Carlson, program manager and creative director for TTF Aerospace. Pre-planning is preeminent.

A case-in-point is overhead bins. “We may find that there are four or five other structural components that need to be addressed,” he says: air conditioning, rails, attachments, passenger service units or electrical, for example. “These projects are fairly vast, and many suppliers are working on them.” It’s imperative that everyone be on the same page going into the venture.

While the trend may be for MROs and specialty shops to integrate a customer’s package, “there are still a significant number of suppliers and firms out there that don’t do the entire soup-to-nuts work but are staying very busy,” says Gary Weissel, consulting firm SH&E’s VP and co-managing officer for commercial and business aviation.

Take a look at some seat suppliers. “A lot of them don’t do integration engineering,” he says. “They just manufacture the item…and then deliver it to whomever the integrator is.” The SH&E executive contends that not everyone does everything equally well.

One MRO might be terrific at installation and okay at kitting. “But,” he asks, “are they really that good at certification, at managing what could be 20 or 30 different suppliers” who might be engaged in a major reconfiguration?

Weissel says integrators often “sub out” much of the work—especially engineering in such realms as IFE—to “small, boutique engineering companies.” But that doesn’t mean integration can’t work. He says large, experienced integrators such as Pemco World Air Services and Timco Aviation Services “have got a lot of experience doing it. They have very well-defined, very mature engineering division[s].”

Beyond Integration?

Indeed, the folks at Timco Aerosystems could be taking cabin interiors a step beyond mere integration, developing what President Rick Salanitri describes as “Total Care.” In the wider world of MRO the concept isn’t new, but in interiors, it’s decidedly fresh. He says Timco is “very close to launching” the initiative, one he calls “a more holistic approach” to spare parts for seating.

In the traditional model, a customer works off a recommended spares provisioning list and purchases spares as needed—with all the lead-time issues attached to the approach.

Timco’s tack is to “re-invent[s] the spares model,” says Salanitri. Historically, interior companies get their goods on an airplane “and then…make [their] money from the spares.” Timco’s Total Care, due to debut with the Boeing 787, hopes to save airline customers “significant sums” on “hard-to-obtain, poor-lead-time performance, very expensive spare parts.” Total Care’s concept is to manufacture those parts up front, during the production cycle, when economies of scale produce lower costs. Then the idea is to perfuse those parts throughout a customer’s network “so they’ll be able to have the parts they need, when they need them, at the locations they need,” says Salanitri.

Prime candidates for the program are the kind of parts that get kicked around a lot, such as tray tables. “We’ll produce those parts on the front end,” says Salanitri. “Then…depending on how [the customer’s] line maintenance network is configured, we’ll customize a replacement program that suits his overnight maintenance requirements.”

Calling it “a new type of relationship between the seat OEM and the airline customer,” Salanitri contends the set-up “incentivizes us to design a better product.” As he explains, Timco aims to “embed some of our MRO heritage into our seating product.”

Indications are Timco intends to expand Total Care into other precincts of the airplane cabin. “Why does it have to be limited to seats, or carpet, or other components?” asks Salanitri. Why not extend the concept to parts subject to similarly high abuse: lavs, sidewalls, ceilings, passenger service units? “Everything that appears on a customer’s cabin discrepancy list is a candidate for Total Care,” he says.

Passenger Experience

Making airlines and ticket-buying passengers happy is critical. Cabin interiors are irreducible incubators of those impressions. “The main touch point that a passenger sees, the [place] they spend their time in…is the interior,” says SH&E’s Weissel. Impressionable passengers extrapolate from the condition of the interior the condition of the aircraft in general, whether or not that assumption is correct.

That’s why getting things right from the inside out is so important. “The seat—indeed, the interior as a whole—becomes the airline’s brand,” says Weissel. “It becomes the airline’s message, the memory of that person [as to what] they see and feel that airline’s all about.” And the memory never fades to black.