New market share for IAI: aiming for the conversion of up to 20 Airbus A330 aircraft per year

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) completed this morning (Friday) the maiden flight of an Airbus A330-300 aircraft that it converted from a passenger plane to a freighter, as part of a new program to expand its conversion operations to wide-body aircraft manufactured by Airbus. The aircraft took off from Ben Gurion Airport and the flight lasted about an hour and a quarter, during which test pilots from IAI's Aviation Group tested its systems.

The company, whose chairman is Boaz Levy and whose CEO is Guy Bar-Lev, said that the successful test flight is a significant milestone towards receiving the STC certification, which is required for a fundamental change in an aircraft's configuration before operating it in a new format. The flight was preceded by complex structural work on the aircraft's fuselage, centered on the installation of the main cargo door, which required creating an opening 3.6 meters wide and 2.6 meters high in the side of the aircraft, so that it could carry about 30 containers and a total weight of more than 60 tons.

"Converting such an aircraft is like open-heart surgery. In the end, a completely new and different vehicle emerges," a senior IAI official stated.

IAI's Aviation Group has been engaged for decades in converting passenger aircraft into cargo aircraft and has so far focused on aircraft manufactured by the American company Boeing, including the 737, 767, and wide-body 777 models. According to company data, it has converted about 300 Boeing aircraft to date, and in 2022 it began planning its moves for the conversion of Airbus 330 aircraft. IAI says that its progress in the ability to convert aircraft of this type may open up an additional market for it, in a way that will meet the continuing trend of growth in global demand for air cargo transport - partly due to the expansion of e-commerce.

The conversion operations of these aircraft from passenger to cargo configuration allow airlines to return them to additional operational cycles, which generate money for them, instead of purchasing new cargo aircraft. Aviation sources estimated that the price of an aircraft converted for cargo transport is about 30%-40% of the price of a new aircraft.

The head of the Aviation Group at IAI, Yaakov (Berko) Berkovitz, estimated that within a decade IAI will reach an optimal rate of converting 15 to 20 A330 aircraft per year. According to him, after completing the development and licensing procedures, the conversion duration of a single aircraft is expected to be about five months, and to support this rate, IAI has invested in recent years in establishing and expanding conversion capabilities at other plants around the world.

IAI refuses to name the airline that owns the Airbus aircraft it converted to cargo configuration, noting that "it is a long-standing client of the company." IAI data shows that about 100 employees work on the conversion of the aircraft every day, and about 30,000 parts were assembled in it. Thus, about 350 passenger seats were removed from it, along with the interior design and equipment of the passenger cabin, which weigh a total of about 20 tons.

The conversion activity is one of the main anchors in the civil activity of the Aviation Group and constitutes, according to Berkovitz, about 40% to 50% of it. According to IAI reports, the sales of the Aviation Group amounted to about 1.61 billion dollars in 2025, compared to about 1.48 billion dollars the year before.

The successful maiden flight of the A330 concludes a significant business week for IAI, which began with the signing of the "Achilles Shield" deal in Greece, in which it is a partner alongside Rafael in supplying air defense systems worth about 3 billion euros. In the middle of the week, it completed a successful demonstration for the German Navy of launching LORA missiles from a vessel in the North Atlantic Ocean. The demonstration, which included two launches and precise hits on targets, brings IAI closer to another significant deal in Germany, which has become one of the key markets for the Israeli defense industries in recent years. Last month, IAI published its reports for the second quarter of the year, during which its sales rose by 35% compared to the corresponding quarter in 2025 and amounted to 2.18 billion dollars, and its order backlog amounted to about 35 billion dollars.