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Is 2024 the year of the aircraft “power surge”?
An examination of how aircraft values and lease rates for spare engines have evolved in 2024, and what has driven the significant movements in this market.
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Lalitya Dhavala
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As we race towards the end of the year, I’ve examined how values and lease rates for spare engines have evolved in 2024, and what has driven the significant movements in this market.
Overall, Market Values for engines that power narrowbody aircraft have risen by around 12.3% over the last five-year period (on a fleet-weighted average basis). With the demand for single-aisle passenger aircraft rebounding post the pandemic, coupled with expensive new materials and high inflation on OEM list pricing, new-generation engine values have strengthened. Further, as the engine shop visit turnaround times increased, attention has turned to the green time remaining on the previous-generation engines that could be deployed into service, thereby increasing the value of maintenance on these engines as well as the asset market value. Lease Rates have exhibited strong increases as well over the last five years.
Meanwhile, values for engines powering other asset classes such as regional jet, regional turboprop and widebody have not yet returned fully to pre-pandemic levels (on a fleet-weighted average basis).
In the regionals sector, demand has been slower to trickle through; and on the twin-aisle sector, OEMs tend to tie in list prices with comprehensive engine maintenance programmes, coupled with lower utilisation on twin-aisles meaning fewer spares are needed. Widebody engine Lease Rates, however, have risen over the last few years and surpassed their pre-pandemic levels.
Looking more closely at the key single-aisle associated engines over the last year, we can observe the correlation between Values and Lease Rates for previous-generation powerplants (CFM56-5B, -7B, V2527) rising strongly on the back of more modest increases or stability in the Values and Lease Rates of the new-generation engines (PW1127G, Leap-1A and Leap-1B). A notable exception here is the PW1127G, where Lease Rates saw increases of up to 30% as a result of the scale of the powder-metal contamination issues resulting in the wide-scale aircraft grounding (564 A320neo family aircraft stored) and the removal of an average of around 1,100 engines throughout 2024.
Turning to the twin-aisle sector, there is less correlation between the technology of the engines. Rather, the notable increases in both Market Value and Market Lease Rates have been on the engines that support the Airbus A330ceo or the Boeing 777-200LR/300ER platforms, both of which have seen substantial improvement in their values in 2024.
As long-haul traffic recovered in 2024, these workhorses of the twin-aisle segment have proven the preferred choice for airlines re-deploying this capacity.
In addition, both aircraft types offer conversion potential to freighter configuration, increasing the demand for spare engines. Of the A330 engine choices, although the GE CF6-80E1 has shown the largest increases this year, it trails behind both the Pratt & Whitney PW4168 and the Rolls-Royce Trent 772 when compared to pre-pandemic levels, with only the latter engine seeing its values and lease rates higher than pre-pandemic due to these engines typically having more green time available, with several examples still on their first run.
The increase in the value of maintenance particularly, for the engines that power single-aisles, has led us to increase our expectations for their longer-term values as well. In fact, our analysis of the depreciation of the value of the engine overhaul and life-limited part stack has shown that these are falling less rapidly than before, and consequently we made several changes to how much we depreciate these into the future. For key single-aisle engine types such as the CFM56-5B, CFM56-7B, and the IAE V2500-A5, depreciation through their Phase 2 (stable phase) has been reduced to 4% per annum, resulting in stronger residual values for the Airbus A320ceo and Boeing 737NG platforms they power. Furthermore, engine OEMs have advised that the technological improvements that are in development currently are expected to be retrofittable. Therefore, such engines are now not expected to see their values decline prematurely due to replacement by a more efficient version of the same engine.
To find out more about how these affect aircraft values and lease rates, or to find a similar summary of our aircraft values, please join the Cirium Ascend Consultancy webinar on 12 December where I will be joined by Rob Morris and George Dimitroff to take stock of this year and look ahead to 2025. In the meantime, if you enjoyed this analysis, please take a moment to consider voting for us as your Appraiser of the Year; you can cast your vote here.
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