UTC's planned acquisition of Rockwell Collins will create a business unit that combines Collins’s avionics, communications and interiors specialities with the extensive UTC Aerospace Systems (UTAS) portfolio. The $30 billion deal, announced yesterday, would integrate Rockwell Collins and UTAS into Collins Aerospace Systems. It is expected to close by mid-2018.

Rockwell CEO Kelly Ortberg will be the unit’s CEO, with UTAS president Dave Gitlin adding the COO title. A combined Rockwell/UTAS unit would generate $23 billion in 2017 revenue—75 percent from commercial business and the remainder from defense work. Sales would be split 60 percent and 40 percent between OEM (forward-fit) and aftermarket, respectively.

The new unit’s scale is expected to help UTC boost efficiency for customers and push back against OEM cost-reduction efforts. Both companies are betting big on the connected aircraft. In addition to sensor-equipped systems made by both companies, Collins’s extensive communications services link aircraft with ground systems, from airports to operations control centers.

UTC president and CEO Greg Hayes said that the product lines have “a couple hundred million dollars” of overlap—much less than the $8 billion to $10 billion overlap that last year’s proposed UTC-Honeywell merger faced. “There is not a big divestiture risk…You're not seeing consolidation in individual systems,” he noted.