We always read about it on the Internet. Airline X has a brand new seat, and they are going to reconfigure the fleet to install all the new items. Frequent flyers will follow this news closely, as a cabin refit means added comfort when flying.
Have a guess at how much it might cost per plane. Do you think it is $200,000? How about $500,000? Maybe $1 or $2 million? Well, I recently found out the price and it’s certainly not cheap!
It Costs How Much To Reconfigure A Cabin?!
Imagine you have five Airbus A340-300s and have decided to keep them for a while. You need to reconfigure the cabin with new seats to have a seamless product with the rest of your fleet.
The good people at Swiss did just that. First, the entire aircraft has to be gutted inside, with all the materials such as wiring and so on being replaced.
How does 100 million Swiss francs sound? That’s €91,250,000, £80,475,000, US$101,000,000, AU$148,500,000 or 7,165,002,000 Indian Rupees. At twenty million per aircraft, it’s certainly not cheap!
Overall Thoughts
Swiss have a blog post on the project to reconfigure their Airbus A340-300 fleet which is definitely worth reading. It provides a nice overview on just how complex something like this is.
The reason I really liked it is because it quantifies it properly. So many casual aviation fans think reconfiguring a cabin is a simple enough task, “just rip out a few seats and you’re done”, which is just not the case.
Were you aware of how much it cost to reconfigure an aircraft from nose to tail? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Kentaro Iemoto via Wikimedia Commons.
Swiss A340-300 reconfiguration image via Swiss.
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