Dubbed the “Queen of the Skies”, the British Airways Boeing 747 was the plane of choice for long-haul flights for decades until the fleet was grounded in 2020. Now one of the few remaining 747s is being stored and maintained in the Vale of Glamorgan by aircraft disassembly firm, Ecube.
The company dismantled 18 of the retired aircrafts at its headquarters in St Athan and kept one intact on site as a heritage piece. But preserving the impressive jumbo jet is a costly exercise, said chief commercial officer Steven Taylor.
“It needs to be cleaned periodically to stop mould growing on the outside, and to prevent something as simple as keeping a smell out of the cabin you need to have constant airflow and you need a ground power unit to do that. That costs money,” said Steven.
“It’s been with us two years now but you’ll probably start to see the serious effects of the stationary aircraft maybe in 12 months’ time.”
The firm hopes it can secure funding to continue preserving the aircraft and potentially move the aircraft off airside and open it out to the public as a museum piece or event space.
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“We're in discussions with interested parties about what can be done with the 747 aircraft,” said Steven, adding that they don’t have an investment figure in mind.
As well as retiring and storing jumbo jets, Ecube’s main source of revenue is in its aircraft disassembly, recycling and aircraft end-of-life services. It also offers maintenance and lease transition services.
It was founded in 2011 by Tim Schmidt and Mike Corne who saw an opportunity to professionalise the aircraft end-of-life sector which saw aircrafts mostly scrapped or salvaged for their valuable engines and electrical parts and stored in giant aircraft graveyards in the desert.
“Airlines and asset owners were typically sending their aircrafts to the desert and cherry picking parts over extended periods of time and, visually, it just didn’t look good and the quality of service in the market was questionable,” said Steven.
The planes that arrive at Ecube - ranging from Airbus A320s to Boeing 767s - are usually leased to the airlines by leasing companies, although some airlines do own their aircrafts.
They can then be maintained, stored or disassembled but between 80% to 90% of the planes that land in at the site end up being teared down for their parts. The leasing company will give Ecube a harvest list of 300 to 1,500 parts that they want removed from the airframe.
Fuel, hydraulic and oils are removed first before the valuable aircraft engines and other components. The landing gear is the final piece to be removed.
The disassembly hangar, which holds three narrow-bodied aircrafts all at various stages of disassembly, is hive of activity during my visit as parts are removed, recorded, photographed and then stored.
Once these components are removed they are delivered back to the companies to be resold into the aftermarket. “That is effectively back into an airline’s operation,” said Steven. “So an airline can see significant cost savings by using used materials versus new materials.”
The company has a team of in-house carpenters which construct bespoke crates to ship and transport components of all shapes and sizes from controls to engine nacelles.
The parts that are not wanted by the leasing companies are repurposed and recycled to try and reduce as much wastage as possible.
Tim, who had experience in lean processing and management, brought efficiencies into the disassembly process, speeding up the time it takes for an aircraft to be dismantled. It now takes Ecube between three and five weeks to fully dismantle an aircraft.
“There are two key things that are important for an asset owner when they want to disassemble an aircraft - slot availability and the time it takes to remove the components,” said Steven. “Mike and Tim over the years have built up a significant reputation in the industry of quality and speed of service.”
The company is based at the former RAF airfield now the Bro Tathan Business Park with support from the Welsh Government, where it has a hangar space totaling 129,000 sq ft (approximately 43,000 sq ft per hangar) and a fully operational 1,800m runway.
And when I first encounter Ecube’s HQ, I’m struck by the sea of tail fins attached to aircrafts in a “de-production” line waiting to be teared down for their parts in the disassembly queue. A sign that business is booming for the relatively young firm.
Financially, the firm is also looking quite upbeat, with a projected 30% rise in revenues in its current financial year and occupying 15% of the global market share of aircraft disassemblies done each year.
However, the pandemic had an impact on the business with travel restrictions significantly affecting the aviation industry, resulting in fewer than expected aircraft retirements.
“Asset owners were keeping them for longer,” said Steven. “They didn’t have the confidence that they could get the value that they needed from the aftermarket so they sat on them. Some of the airlines’ leases were also extended by the lessors so the aircraft was pushed back two years to when it would arrive to us.”
Despite this, business is now returning to pre-pandemic levels as travel returns to normal and Steven points out that the company still maintained its market share despite the downturn.
“Even though we did 36 disassemblies last year, a low number for Ecube, that was still the highest number across all our competitors,” said Steven. “So we still hold the highest global market share. That is important for us because it's a market driven reduction in aircraft, not an Ecube driven reduction in aircraft.”
This year the company is aiming to disassemble over 80 aircrafts across all its three sites - which as well at St Athan include those in the US and Spain. An ambitious target, but one Steven hopes the firm can achieve since opening its new Arizona facility in October last year.
It is now the only disassembly company operating in both Europe and North America and is currently trying to attract US aircrafts to the site, with business going well so far, said Steven.
“We have eight aircrafts on the ground right now and have another three in the next two weeks,” he said. “We think we're gonna have a lot more demand than we have capacity in the first four months.”
He hopes the firm will be able to tear down a minimum of 20 aircrafts at the new site over the next 12 months.
“We'll steadily grow the capacity there. We're working a number of aircrafts per month that we can tear down at each location. In the UK, we can tear down up to five aircrafts a month. In Spain, we can do two a month. In the US, we'll get up to two a month by April. So we will be the largest disassembler by volume and by capacity,” said Steven.
Its third facility is in Castellón, Spain which it opened in 2019 to offset any Brexit challenges and offer more storage within Europe.
“Mike and Tim saw the writing on the wall and felt they needed another location that I guess at the time could be a saving grace should the doors close because of Brexit,” said Steven, “and the dry, warmer climate is more favourable for storage than Wales.”
Now the company is evaluating the Asian market as a potential growth area.
But as well as growth overseas the firm is also looking at growing its HQ in Wales. The firm wants to increase its employment numbers from around 80 staff to 120 in the next couple of years.
“The growth in staff numbers is linked to the number of aircrafts growth. In order to get the extra capacity we need to hire more people,” said Steven.
“That's a continuing focus for us and we're investing in apprenticeships to support that continuing growth. There's also a large pool of resources in the area that we know we can tap into which is really helpful for us as a business.”
The Welsh Government-owned Bro Tathan site is managed by Cardiff Airport and home to many other maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) aviation firms including Ecube’s next door neighbour Caerdav, chaired by Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson.
Asked whether Ecube or other MROs were a part of Newport City Council’s regional freeport bid with Cardiff Airport, Steven said they were not asked to participate in the bid but appreciate the benefits it would bring despite the firm already having its own customs facility.
“We actually have a customs warehouse in St Athan where it’s a favourable trading location for some of our customers,” he said.
“If a leasing company wanted to sell an aircraft and attract no tax, they can fly the aircraft into Ecube and put it into our customs warehouse facility. They’ll transact the sale and then they can fly it out the next day, and it doesn’t attract any tax. That’s a huge benefit for us, but it’s a separate facility that we had to set up with HMRC independently.”
Aside from increasing the number of aircraft disassemblies per year, Ecube is also looking at growing the recycling and upcycling division of the company as part of its sustainability goals.
The company upcycles aircraft components into furniture such as coffee tables, coaster sets and mirrors and also repurposes control panels and other technical parts for flight simulators and aviation training in nearby flight schools.
Its sister company is an e-commerce website called Plane Reclaimers that offers raw aeroplane parts to members of the public to purchase. This can range from inspection mirrors to fuel tank covers which are bought as memorabilia by former cabin crew, pilots and aviation enthusiasts.
The website was launched after the firm was part of a 10-part documentary on retired aeroplanes after getting requests for historic aircraft parts.
Some components have also been used by TV and film companies to build plane sets, including recreating aircraft interiors and plane wreckages.
In total, over 90% of an aircraft that comes into Ecube’s dismantle hangar is recycled and the company works with the Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association (AFRA) for best management practices across all its sites.
“What’s happened for years is, we’ve just removed those parts that customers wanted and the rest of the aircraft has gone to recycling and ultimately scrap. We’re trying to challenge our customers now to say, from a responsibility perspective, that there ought to be a way to use those additional components left on an aircraft that would otherwise just go to scrap,” said Steven. “The whole concept around that is carbon footprint. For every part we reuse that means one less part needing to be manufactured.”
In an effort to stay ahead of the curve, the company is now in collaboration with multinational corporations to work on a carbon recycling project.
“Our role in that is the provision of parts off an aircraft to help repurpose. The ultimate goal is to put that material back into the manufacturing process so it becomes a full-circle economy,” said Steven.
“Carbon recycling is a huge challenge for the industry and if we look ahead 10 years it's probably going to come to a head sooner than we think. We have the technology to make aircrafts with carbon, but we don’t have the technology yet to unmake them.”
Steven gives an example of a 12-year old 787 which was dismantled and repurposed, but the hull could not be disposed of because it was made up of mostly carbon fibre.
“Manufactured carbon fibre is made of long strands of carbon which can be moulded into anything. When you recycle it, the process makes short strands of carbon meaning that the reuse and reapplication is limited.”
“So technology is trying to be developed so that the longer the strand you can recycle, the better the reapplication. There’s limited technology right now, but there’s a lot of interest in making that work. That's going to be our next challenge as a recycler in five years’ time onwards.”
There is also a lot of potential for investment in that technology and wider green initiatives in the aviation industry.
“When a new aircraft comes off the production line a leasing company, and when I say a leasing company, it's effectively a financial company that has pension funds and investment funds that buy aircraft as an asset, knowing that that asset will return a 5% margin over 15 years,” said Steven.
“All of a sudden these lessors are finding access to green funding. So there's some confidence that the supply chain of that investment is green, as a fairly strong strategy around sustainability and ESG then you can access that funding. So we're getting challenged now by the leasing companies and it will come more of a stronger challenge over the coming years but all the way down the supply chain down to the end-of-life where we are, feeds all the way back up to the ability to access certain funding at preferential rates.
“I think in the next couple of years it will be fairly significant and supplier selection criteria will be a part of it. For example, if you're if you're an asset owner, and you have five different systemic providers, there may come a time when the selection of that disassembly provider not only slot availability and capacity, turnaround time, but ESG policy as well and how much they can recycle could feed into whose selected to support them.”
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