As Airbus and Boeing start to eat into the market of third-party providers by exploiting services as an added share of revenue, the maintenance, repair, and overhaul business continues to undergo radical change, and perhaps most acutely in the Asia-Pacific region. 

“Forty percent of total airplanes in the next 20 years will go to Asia-Pacific and as a result, services will be big,” said Boeing Commercial Airplanes regional vice president of sales Dinesh Keskar at Bangalore’s Aero India air show on Wednesday. “There will be more competition in that space than in buying planes.”

India, in fact, should prove particularly lucrative for the two OEMs. Boeing has forecast demand in India over the next two decades for 2,300 aircraft, 84 percent of which will involve high-utilization single-aisle models. While Boeing already engages in training and health monitoring of aircraft in India, it has begun exploring opportunities in landing gear and overhauls. Boeing already has built a three-narrowbody hangar as part of $8 billion in offsets associated with a 2006 widebody order from Air India.

Increasingly characterized by outsourcing and “per-hour” contracts, maintenance accounts for the biggest portion of the services business. So-called digitalization represents one common denominator in the sector, as Boeing and Airbus offer interconnected and integrated services, which, according to them, create additional value for airlines, lessors, and MRO companies by allowing real-time decision-making and “optimization” of flight and maintenance operations through analytics.

According to Keskar, India’s Vistara could find Boeing’s global fleet care per-hour program and logistics for spare parts particularly useful. “It can use the service from us for the ten 787s they have ordered,” he explained. “The number is too small for them to spend time on. The plane is digital...We can collect the data...and do the maintenance."

Airbus’s new Global Services Forecast predicts a $4.6 trillion worldwide market for commercial aircraft services from 2018 to 2037. The manufacturer based the new analysis on a three-part market breakdown, respectively focusing on the aircraft, the airline operation, and the passenger experience, explained Anand Stanley, president and managing director of Airbus India.

According to Airbus, aircraft-focused lifecycle services represents the largest segment of growth and includes maintenance, spares pool access, tooling, technical training, and system upgrades. This market value totals $2.2 trillion over the 20-year period, from $76 billion in 2018 to more than $160 billion per year by 2037.

On a parallel subject of the various problems Indian low-fare carriers IndiGo and GoAir encountered with the Pratt & Whitney PW1000G turbofans that power their Airbus A320neos, Stanley said Pratt has retrofitted fixes on 95 percent of the engines and will finish its work in the next two months.