Building airframes under license – how does it work?
Could you buy the type license off someone and have it built somewhere with a trained but way cheaper workforce?
Could you buy the type license off someone and have it built somewhere with a trained but way cheaper workforce?
Sure. That is what Airbus is doing right now in China with the A318. Or, closer to us: Swiss RUAG Aerospace bought the type certificate of the Do228 after the collapse of Fairchild-Dornier and gets the airplanes built in Germany under license.
I was thinking smaller types… but probably they wouldn’t sell you the license if you can build it for half the price.
Also the issue is whether they will allow you to make and sell spare parts. Selling a plane is one thing but being able to sell the traditionally grotesquely overpriced airframe spares is quite another. But a license to build the planes, without a license to make and freely sell parts for them afterwards, is worth much less.
The maker i was thinking of isn’t making spare parts anymore as far as I know anyway…
In that case, a good negotiator may persuade the maker to sell the type certificate outright. The TC for the type I fly has changed hands five times: American Aviation – Grumman – Gulfstream – American General Aviation Corp. – Tiger Aircraft – True Flight Aerospace. Still commonly referred to as Grumman.
The TC for the type I fly has changed hands five times…
The last production airframe was sold in 2006. I have looked at the website of the new owner of the type certificate, but nowhere among a lot of meaningless bla-bla they write anything about building new aircraft. Owning the certificate and building aeroplanes from it are several (hundred) million Dollars apart.
In such a case one would buy the TC just to get the right to make spares.
For almost any big GA brand that is a multi million $ business.
A few years ago I knew a guy who bought a tiny one-man business in the USA, making some totally trivial bits for Mooneys. That business, running on one bench in a spare bedroom probably, was selling (IIRC) $100k/year.
Here in the UK, De Havilland have bought up a load of this stuff. I am not sure how exactly they make money out of it. I went to a presentation by one of their people a while ago and it sounded like they make money out of approving mods, and approving substitute parts which, being a 145 and 21 company and the TC holder, they can do.
