ST Engineering, Airbus and their joint venture, Elbe Flugzeugwerke (EFW) has redelivered an A321 passenger-to-freighter (P2F) aircraft to BBAM Limited Partnership, a leading aircraft lease management company with over $29 billion of assets under management and some 150 professionals located in offices around the world. This is the first A321P2F redelivery made to BBAM, with several more units to come as contracted with EFW. This first BBAM A321 converted freighter will be leased to British charter airline, Titan Airways.
Steve Zissis, president and chief executive officer of BBAM said, “ST Engineering, Airbus and EFW’s A321P2F programme delivers strongly in the areas of innovativeness and value enhancement. We are pleased to partner with them and our customer, Titan Airways on a solution that fully meets our customer’s requirements and drives value for our investors.”
“We are delighted to take delivery of our first A321P2F from BBAM and EFW,” said Alastair Willson, managing director of Titan Airways. He added, “Titan Airways has over 32 years of successful freight and passenger operations, and has been an Airbus operator since 2013. The A321P2F will enable us to utilise all the benefits of this type into our air freight activities including best-in-class economics, reduced noise, a lower carbon footprint and real time health monitoring, ensuring the highest levels of reliability.”
The A321P2F is the first in its size category to offer containerised loading in both the main (up to 14 full container positions) and lower deck (up to 10 container positions). EFW’s A321P2F solution has a generous and proven gross payload of over 28 metric tonnes, with further upside potential in future conversions. The solution, which comes with optimised weight distribution to enable empty flights and random loading, accords high flexibility for operators, in particular express carriers. The fact that EFW’s programme is the only OEM solution for A321P2F in the market also ensures lifecycle value, given its superiority in quality, reliability and ease of maintenance.
“We want to thank our customer, BBAM and operator of this freighter, Titan Airways for entrusting us with growing their freighter fleet with a new member of the Airbus freighter family,” said Andreas Sperl, chief executive officer of EFW. “As our A321P2F programme steadily gains traction with more redeliveries, we will, together with our parent companies ST Engineering and Airbus, double down on delivering this innovative solution to the market and capturing more narrowbody freighter market share,” Sperl added.
To meet the rising demand for A321P2F, ST Engineering, along with EFW, plans to set up additional conversion sites in China, the US and Germany which will ramp up its global conversion capacity to 25 slots per year by 2023.
