Satair Group Moves Into Business Jet Market

Satair Group has made a strategic entry into the global business jet market through an exclusive five-year deal with Honeywell Aerospace covering inventory management and distribution to support the implementation of Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) on Honeywell Primus II - equipped business aviation aircraft.

There are more than 3000 Primus II business jets that need to be upgraded globally to the new ADS-B standard by the mandated date of 2020, so a highly-efficient and effective distribution system needs to be deployed to ensure worldwide compliance.

Satair Group has had a long-standing business relationship with some other Honeywell divisions since the late 1980s, but for some time has wanted to have a business relationship with Honeywell Aerospace, one of the aerospace industry’s key OEMs.

This new business resulted partially from a high-level visit by Honeywell CEO Dave Cote to Satair Group in October 2015 and which led to a decision by both companies to invest energy to find mutual business opportunities. Also there was a very strong push and support from Honeywell Aerospace Asia which has had a 10-year relationship with Satair Group in Singapore. Furthermore, the business jet aviation market has been on Satair Group’s target list for some time.

Under this new agreement Satair Group will invest heavily in both new and serviceable equipment for replacement, rental exchanges and loan equipment. Depending on the configuration of the aircraft, a variety of components including Radio Management Communications and GPS Line Replaceable Units (LRUs) could require either replacement or upgrade to meet the mandate.

“We have started the process of contacting some 300 business jet aviation maintenance providers as part of our role to be a master distributor for Honeywell Aerospace,” said Steen Karsbo, Vice President of Business Development at Satair Group.

“For mandates such as this the historic trend is for aircraft owners and operators to leave things until the last minute. So instead of sitting around and waiting, our role is to act now and persuade the maintenance providers to schedule their clients’ business jets for upgrade earlier than the mandated date by incentivising them, through having guaranteed delivery of equipment, so making sure the upgrades are done in a reasonable timeframe, thereby making production and capacity scheduling more efficient”, he added.

For Satair Group this first foothold into the business jet aviation market offers a key strategic opportunity to have a bigger long-term presence in this important sector. Many of Satair Group’s Business Partners already supply equipment to the business jet aviation market and Steen indicated that many of them are ‘already knocking on our door’ asking when Satair Group is going to be able to give them access to more business by distributing their products into this sector.

Steen stated, however: “We have advised them that our first priority is to ramp up and service Honeywell Aerospace initially, but that by mid-2017 our key intention is to widen our product offering to the business jet aviation market.”