Important Announcement!
Aircraft seating has notoriously high barriers to entry, so when two years ago a new name emerged at Aircraft Interiors in Hamburg, complete with a prize 60,000-unit launch order from one of the fastest-growing carriers in Asia, people sat up and took notice. Mirus Aircraft Seating marked its debut at the show by announcing that its newly approved Hawk seat would be factory installed on AirAsia’s on-order A320neos as well as retrofitted to some of its A320ceos – a total of 312 aircraft.
The UK firm followed that at last year’s event with an agreement to supply a long-range version of the product on sister airline AirAsia X’s A330s and on-order A330neos. Altogether, it gave the start-up, which had opened its factory near Norwich only in June 2015, a backlog of some 100,000 seats to be delivered over 10 years. The first A320 seats were shipped to the Malaysian carrier at the end of the year and are now flying.
So how did a business that did not even have its own premises this time three years ago end up with one of the most lucrative recent fleet deals?
The story begins in 2011, when Mirus founder and managing director Phil Hall, who had a background in motor racing engineering, met AirAsia chief executive Tony Fernandes. They did not know each other well, but their paths had crossed a year or two earlier when the Malaysian entrepreneur was dabbling in Formula 1 with the Caterham brand.
Full story here: https://www.flightgl...-aircra-446361/
