Don’t you hate it when you go out shopping for a product, try several stores, and make your purchase, then discover that someone else had the same product for a lower price? The truth is I was likely conditioned to assume that only those stores I tried could offer that product at a price I thought competitive. Perhaps those stores had culled my favor by being the biggest, or what I thought was the only source of the product. Regardless, the seasoned shoppers among you would tell me that my proce...

I love reading about facts, figures, and forecasts, or as my military friends would say, F3. I come across quite a few of these and thought you’d enjoy reading them in summary form. Each entry is properly cited. I’ll do these for you once or twice a year. Airbus forecasts nearly 37,400 new aircraft valued at US$5.8 Trillion required over 20 years.1 Fleet will more than double to 48,000 in 20 Years based on traffic growing at 4.4% per year. Growth drivers include private consumption increasing 2....

For those of you who contribute either directly or indirectly to the military Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) market, fasten your seat belts, realignment is coming. We often hear the civilian global MRO market quantified in the $50 billion range; that’s indeed huge. If that impresses you, consider this: as recently as 2011, the global military MRO market was valued at $66 billion, and that excludes China and Russia. On the other hand, that value fell to $62.5 and $60.7 billion respecti...

A growing trend I’ve observed in my consulting and auditing activities involves Maintenance Repair and Overhaul MROs) organisations opening up affiliated aftermarket distributorships. For example, an MRO opens up a separate but affiliated firm, and gets that distributor firm to be accredited to the ASA-100. From all appearances there seems to be many benefits for the MRO with this arrangement, and these will be reviewed. This trend also extends to OEMs, Airlines, and tear-down/disassembly facili...

In a letter written in 1796 by the famous British Admiral Horatio Nelson, he makes an appeal to the ruling politicians to reconsider an order they had given for the Navy to evacuate the Mediterranean; the reconsideration based on a change of affaires in the region. In fact, rather than withdrawing, he recommends making a vigorous and desperate attempt to defend the area, led by Naval Officers exhibiting “more than common resolution”. It is in this letter that he utters his famous quote “desperat...

There is no doubt that the movement of OEMs into the aftermarket in the last 15 years has caused tectonic change in the MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) and Distribution ecosystem. Such evolution is not uncommon, but unfortunately there appears to be ample evidence that more than a few of the OEMs are unfairly leveraging their monopolistic positions to withhold reasonable access to their repair/overhaul manuals (Instructions for Continued Airworthiness) from independent MROs. Independent ...