Please welcome Vice President Investor Relations, Chris Tillett.
Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with you today and thank you for coming to AAR's 2026 Investor Day. I see many familiar faces in the crowd, but for those of you I don't know, my name is Chris Tillett. I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations here at AAR. Before we begin, a couple of mandatory housekeeping items. Today's presentation contains forward-looking statements which are subject to a number of risks. Actual results may vary for reasons that we cite in our Form 10-K and other SEC filings. Reconciliations to any non-GAAP financial measures discussed during today's presentation can be found in the back of the deck.
On the basis of presentation, you may have seen last week that we announced a re-segmenting of our business and repositioning of our portfolio with the intended wind down of our commercial programs business. This segment realignment reflects AAR's continued focus on growth, margin expansion, and cash flow generation. We have reorganized into 4 reporting segments, which are Parts Supply, Repair, Engineering, and Software, Government Solutions, Legacy Commercial, and Legacy Commercial Programs.
We will report under this new structure beginning with the 4th quarter and fiscal year ending May 31st, 2026. The details of the segment reorganization and the wind down of the Legacy Commercial Program segment can be found in the press release and presentation posted to our website last week. For purposes of today's Investor Day presentation, we will present the company aligned to the new segmentation unless otherwise noted.
Reconciliations of historical non-GAAP results aligned to the new segmentation can be found in the appendix to the presentation. This morning, we also reaffirmed our guidance for the fourth fiscal quarter and full year 2026, which we issued with our latest quarterly results on March 24th. As you see here on the slide, there has been no change to our prior expectations for the quarter or the year.
Now on to the main event. We will begin the day with an update on the strategic vision from our Chairman, President, and CEO, John Holmes. Following John's presentation, we'll have a brief update on the aviation aftermarket, followed by a deeper dive on parts, repair, and software. Lastly, we will show you how this platform comes together to work for our government customers, and then our CFO, Dylan Wolin, will bring it home with a financial update and discussion of our revised framework. We will have a Q&A session after the first few presentations, followed by a brief intermission, and then another Q&A session at the end of the day before wrapping up, hopefully around noon. With that, it is my pleasure to welcome our Chairman, President, and CEO, John Holmes.
Hey, good morning, everybody. It's awesome to be here with you today. I was thinking about all the things that have changed since we were here 3 years ago. A lot has changed. I think most notably now we have professional lighting, professional announcement, music when you come in. I mean, things have been going really well. I hope everybody notices that. Just for those of you I don't know, and I'm lucky to know most of you in the room, just a little bit about my background. Started at the company. I was a investment banking analyst and spent a little bit of time in private equity. My first role at the company was in a strategy role at corporate.
I have the distinct kind of notoriety of accepting the job to come to AAR the night of September 10, 2001, and resigning my job in private equity the morning of 9/11. That was a really interesting time to go from the finance industry to the aviation industry. In all seriousness, those were very powerful early years of the company and kind of shaped a lot of what we've been driving. What we've been driving, what you're going to see, and I want to hit on a couple of key themes.
Just to finish the background, started at 9/11, moved into an operating role. My first role that I'll talk about in a minute was taking over our airframe parts trading business and then held various operating roles in the company up until I became president of the company in 2017 and then CEO in 2018. We've had a consistent playbook that I'll talk about in a minute, but that playbook is driving a lot of change. All kidding aside, a lot has happened since we were here before. The key messages you're gonna hear today are we've got a repositioned and restructured portfolio. We've made a number of structural, durable changes to what we do that's driving results. We have a differentiated culture at AAR. We've been around for 70 years, and our culture underpins everything that we do.
Anything you know about leadership and building successful businesses, it comes back to culture, and we're really proud of what we have at AAR. We have now more than ever a very focused strategy around 3 key activities that we'll talk about, and this strategy has been and will continue to deliver faster and more profitable growth. Just a couple of highlights, a couple high-level numbers just to orient everybody. First, obviously, publicly traded under the symbol AIR. We love that symbol on the New York Stock Exchange. We're actually going to the New York Stock Exchange this afternoon as a management team. Never done that before to ring the bell, so that'll be cool. We passed over the last 12 months $3 billion in sales for the first time in our history, so $3.1 billion in trailing 12-month sales.
We have more than 8,000 members on our team, and EBITDA margin is roughly 12%. Couple things to note off to the right, the donut charts there. First, we are active participants in both the commercial and government market. We're about 70% commercial and about 30% of the company is in the government. This balance has served us very well over time. If you think about moments that we're in right now, as we talked about in the last quarter call, we're seeing a lot of activity on the government side of the business as a result of the conflict in the Middle East. This balance is important to us. Below that, not only do we have balances in different markets, but we have balance across geography.
About 65% of the company is North American focused. The remainder is split roughly between Europe and Asia. These are obviously key aviation markets and areas of growth for us. Finally, Chris just mentioned the new segments. This is a breakdown of how the sales split between each of the 4 new segments. I wanna talk for a minute about the journey that we've been on, and I cannot overstate the number of changes that we've made to the company since 2018, but really in the last 3 years. Before I get to that, I just wanna talk for a minute about my first operating role at AAR.
I was 26 years old, I had been accepted to business school, and I was gonna leave the company and go to business school, and our CEO at the time gave me the chance of a lifetime. He said, "Hey, listen, if you wanna go to business school, that's great. We'll be here when you get out. You can go part-time, or you can put it off for a couple years and try something new." What he offered me was a chance to go run a P&L. I had roommates at the time. I was living in Downtown Chicago. My roommates and I thought, "Oh, running a P&L would be kinda cool. We can lead people." The P&L that I stepped into was our airframe parts trading business, and this was a business that had been underperforming for years.
What occurred to me is that we didn't have focus in that business. If you're trading parts, your intellectual property is your knowledge of the parts. We had 3 product lines: airframe, regional, and APU. We had no specialization, so we developed specialization. We started a 737 product line and got really knowledgeable in just 737 parts. We got into the 757, 767 business and focused on that platform. We weren't doing anything in Airbus back then. We got into Airbus and developed an expertise there. That focus, that playbook of expertise, that helped turn that business around. In 1 year, we went from a loss to 1 of the more profitable businesses in the company, and it's kept growing.
Again, those early lessons formed the basis of what we've been doing at the company, which is bringing more focus and expertise into every single thing that we do. If I think about what's happened since 2018, we've done a lot of portfolio changes. We've made a number of divestitures. We were in composites manufacturing. We got out of that. We were in airlift, where we were flying and operating and owning helicopters. We got out of that. We were in landing gear for years. It was a challenging business. We divested that a little over a year ago. Other wind downs. We've exited our New York component repair facility, which has been a challenge for a very long time.
Most recently, you just heard we're gonna wind down our commercial programs activity, which is a market that's moved away from us. Choosing what you're gonna not do is just as important as choosing what you're going to do, and we've been making those choices too. Since we were here three years ago, we've done $1.2 billion of acquisitions, six acquisitions across our key markets, and we are deepening our expertise, our strength, and our leadership position in each of our areas of focus that I'll talk about in a minute. What does that mean? It means you should come away today knowing that AAR is transformed. The changes that we've made to the business are structural, they're durable, and they're setting ourselves up for growth. We're scaling. We've got more focus than ever.
What's very important is that the businesses that we are in are highly connected, and we'll talk about that in detail. It has been and will continue to deliver higher margins and higher growth. We have an incredible leadership team, and you'll meet many of them today. I'm so proud of the team I get to work with. We've been making investments, both organic and inorganic, to continue to bolster the strategy. Today, we're focused on three things, focused on three areas. Parts, repair, and software. Parts, repair, and software. We offer parts, we offer repairs, and we offer software that allows our customers to plan for and buy the parts and repairs that we sell. We do this in the commercial market big time.
We wanna move further into the government market, we're building a value chain that does not exist in the aviation aftermarket, we're really excited about it. It's working. We've been at this now in a major way for the last three years, you can see the results. Adjusted sales have been growing at an average of 15% CAGR over the last four-plus years. Our EBITDA margins have been growing at a 26% CAGR. Our operating margin's growing at a 31% CAGR, we've been adding roughly a point of margin each year for the last four years. We've been growing, expanding margins at the same time, of course, that's led to a 19% EPS CAGR. When we were here three years ago, we gave some targets.
I want to remind everybody what those targets were. You can see them here. When we made the Triumph acquisition a year later, we updated those targets, and I'm pleased to report that in many cases, we're exceeding the targets or on track to achieve the margin targets. Of course, I'm sure you've all flipped to the last page in the deck, and you know what our new targets are already, but we'll be giving new targets today. This is the team that is making this happen. It's an awesome team. You'll meet most everybody. Most everybody is actually here in the room, and several of us will present. It's a great team. I won't go through everybody, but it's an all-star team. It's a team that we are highly connected.
We know each other. We trust each other. Importantly, we like each other as a team that spends a lot of time together. We really don't sleep very much. It's a great team. A couple things I'll point out in addition. One, many of us are still very early in our careers. We've got a long way to go, and we've got something to prove. We've got something to prove here at AAR, and we are deeply convinced in the opportunity to create real value with this company. Done a little bit, but we got a long way to go. That's a common thread that binds us together. Another thing that binds us together is our culture, I mentioned that at the beginning, which is underpinned by these values.
I'm extraordinary, we all are, extraordinarily proud of the values that drive our company. We've been around a long time. We're not a business that has come together overnight with a bunch of acquisitions. We've been around a long time, and we have a deep culture that drives everything we do. One of the coolest things that I got to do or participate in about 10 years ago was writing these values, and for years AAR had this long flowing mission vision statement that was literally on bronze plaques in all of our facilities. It started out, "Every day we find a way to use our speed, our strength," and then it went on from there. It was kind of like the U.S. Constitution. Everybody remembered, "We the people," but then you kind of didn't know all the other detail.
We looked at this about 10 years ago and we said, "Hey, listen, there are great ideas within this document, but we need to break them down into simple phrases, 2 and 3-word phrases, that all of our teammates around the world can remember and use in their everyday activities." It starts with our first one in the upper left there, quality first and safety always. We have to remember everything we do involves safety of flight, and so nothing is more important when we think about the values and the culture of our company than making sure that quality and safety are at the very top of the list. Another one that we're particularly proud of is the orange square in the lower orange square there, which is make money, have fun. We want our teammates to make money.
We wanna do well at the company, but we wanna have a good time doing it. If you check out any of our social media, and Barry, our communication set is awesome at social media, there's a lot of fun that happens around AAR, and this keeps our team motivated to come in and perform for our customers every day. The last value I wanna mention is the last on the lower right there, and that's own it. Whether you're the CEO, whether you're a mechanic, whether you're in accounts payable, even though we're 8,000 people in the industry, we're still relatively small, and all of us have gotta show up and deliver every day, otherwise the company won't move forward. If you don't do it, there's no one else that's gonna do it, so you gotta show up and own what you do.
Anyway, you can tell I'm proud about these values and they drive all of our actions. It's how we hire people, it's how we evaluate people, it's how we compensate people. Those values are everything. That culture has led us to enjoy relationships with some of the largest airlines in the world, some of the very best OEMs in the world, and some of the most important government entities in the world. AAR does business with over 3,500 customers. There's a list of them here, and we are extraordinarily proud and grateful for the relationships that we have with our customers. I cannot overstate the visibility that we have within these entities, and it's growing visibility too.
We may be a $3 billion company, and there are much, there's much larger players than us out in the industry if you're thinking about OEMs or airlines, but we box above our weight big time in terms of reputation. Just for example, in the last 2 years, we've had the CEOs of several of those airlines at the top come and have breakfast, lunch, or drinks with our board, just so our board has a chance to meet the CEOs of our largest customers. They know who we are, they're willing to spend their time and talk to us about the value that we bring and the things they need from us. We're really proud of the customer relationships that we have. You'll hear from Frank about the OEM relationships that we've built over the years.
These are key to the incredible growth that we've seen in distribution as we are an OEM-aligned provider. Of course, Nick will talk about the government side of things and very proud of the relationships that we've got with governments around the world and the opportunities that we see. Speaking of opportunities, why do we win at those opportunities? Well, first, industry-leading expertise. I mentioned about that focus at the very beginning, driving and building expertise across different platforms and different markets. We have that, and we bring it to work every day. One of the things we've been really focused on since we were last together is driving efficiency and operational excellence throughout everything that we do. Being the best and the fastest in our repair shops, delivering parts sooner than everybody else.
Operational efficiency is setting us apart. You'll hear more about that from Tom later. We've got a global footprint. We want to continue to leverage that and expand that. That's important. It's a global industry by definition. What we want to talk about in a minute is more and more around the unique business model that we have and that value chain I described and the connection between each of our each of our businesses. Again, parts, repair, and software. You're getting the message. I'm going to talk about each of these areas in a bit more detail and then hand it over to my teammates. In parts, two activities in parts. I'm going to start at the top of the slide here. Two activities in the parts. First, new parts distribution. New parts distribution has been the fastest-growing business inside of AAR.
I think everybody's familiar with it, but in case you are not, we are an end-market distributor representing several OEMs, 35 OEMs, around the world. We take the parts that they manufacture and distribute those parts on their behalf around the world. Distribution is a well-understood industry, or a well-understood business in all industries, but our approach is a bit different. We only engage in 2-way exclusive distributorships, meaning we are exclusive, we will not represent competing product for a given OEM in a given market, and that OEM will not sign up a competitor, competitive distributor in that same market. That lines us up. Most of these agreements are 5-10 years in length, so you're aligned for a long time, but what that commitment allows us to do is become deeply familiar with the products that we're selling.
We are not just a stocking distributor buying inventory every quarter and letting it sit in a warehouse until we get a call. We are active participants in the market representing our OEM partners and helping them take market share. This model is working really well, you'll hear more about that later. On the USM side of the business, that's the other area of parts, that is the original business that founded AAR. We buy dozens of engines. About 80% of that business is engine material. We buy dozens of engines each year. We either sell them at whole, but most often we tear them down, refurbish the parts and redistribute the parts, and we do the same thing with airframes. The good thing about this business is it's highly transactional and it keeps us in touch with the market.
You are actively out there buying and trading assets. You're following the way assets values move. You're knowing what parts are in high demand and which parts are not, and it keeps you really close to the market. By the way, that market expertise that we gain from our USM activities is really interesting to the OEMs when we go and pitch them on a new exclusive distribution relationship. That's parts. Repair. Two activities in repair. One, heavy maintenance, airframe MRO, and the second is component repair. Just to frame this for you quickly, airframe MRO is a low teens EBITDA business. Component MRO is a high teens EBITDA business. In airframe MRO, we are working on the entire aircraft. I think some of you have visited our hangars. They're really cool to climb around airplanes.
We are now the largest in North America for airframe MRO. We have industry-leading turnaround times, particularly on 737s and A320s, the platforms that we focus on. We are taking share and expanding and acquiring to continue to bolster this business. It's a high visibility activity inside of airlines, and it leads to a lot of other opportunities that we'll talk about. One of the opportunities airframe MRO leads to is component MRO. Component MRO, you're not working on the whole airframe, but you're actually working on the individual components, engine accessories, hydraulics, valves, pneumatics, things like that. With the Triumph acquisition, we became a big player in component MRO, and that's a big support to the USM business, but it also goes with airframe MRO.
In as much as, when we sign long-term airframe contracts, we also can lock up component work, which as I mentioned, is higher margin. These things go together. Third, software. Relatively new for us. 3 years ago when we were here, we had just made the Trax acquisition. You might remember we had the founders with us, et cetera. Software at the time I remember talking to a few of you. It was like, "Well, why'd you do that?" Trax and getting into the software business had been an idea of Andy Schmidt and I for over 10 years, and I'm not kidding. For over 10 years, we spent time trying to acquire the Trax business. There was a lot of dinners out in Miami to get these guys to ultimately sell.
We got close a few times, and it fell apart, but we finally got it done. This is working out exactly as we hoped. What is Trax? Andy will go in more in detail, but just at a high level, Trax is a maintenance ERP system. What does that mean? It means it runs every single element of the maintenance organization inside of an airline. You cannot run an airline without a system like Trax. You can't. In fact, you're legally required to have it. Every piece of inventory that's on the shelf, every part that's flying on an aircraft, every part that's out for repair, who's repairing it? How long did it take them to repair it? What did they pay for that repair? All of that information, all of those activities are managed with Trax. It's critical to an airline's operation.
Why did we buy Trax? Because Trax is the software that allows our customers to buy the parts and repairs that we sell. It goes together. It goes together. The data that Trax houses is incredibly rich and incredibly helpful. We also bought Trax because we felt that we could help them grow. If you look at the market for maintenance ERP systems, 50% of the world's aircraft are supported by next-generation systems like Trax. Trax really has 2 competitors. We'll go through that. The other 50% of the world's fleet is supported by legacy systems. These are 10, 40, in some cases, 50-year-old systems that will be replaced over time. The airlines that are still running on these old systems are the largest airlines in the world.
Trax, while they had the very best solution in the market, they were a sole proprietorship, 100 guys in Miami, and they couldn't break into those larger airlines. We bought Trax, and in the 3 years that we've owned Trax, we've gotten them into Cathay Pacific. We've gotten them into Virgin Atlantic. We've gotten them into Singapore. We've gotten them into Thai. Most importantly, 1 year ago, we got them into Delta Air Lines. The world's largest, most valuable airline chose Trax to modernize their ERP system. It's a 3-year implementation. We're almost 1 year in. It's going really well. Andy will tell you about it. Once we're successful at Delta, it opens up that whole other 50% of the market for us. In addition to Trax, we've made 1 acquisition and launched something else.
Aerostrat, an acquisition that we made a few months ago, is a company that is engaged in long-range heavy maintenance planning. If you're one of the largest providers of airframe MRO heavy maintenance, it makes sense that you would want to own the software that airlines are using to plan their heavy maintenance, because now you understand how those maintenance decisions are made inside of an airline, and you can optimize the flow inside of your hangars. That's, again, these things go together. The last thing, and we're super excited about this, is we launched last month, AirVoyant. Airlines spend $60 billion a year on parts. It's a lot of money, and it is an incredibly manual effort, and we see it every day because you know why?
We sell parts, and we are on the receiving end of emails and spreadsheets and phone calls, this manual effort conducted by airline procurement teams around the world that takes a lot of time and results in inefficient decisions. This is a problem we've been thinking about how to solve for a long time. We have the Trax user base. We have a great partner in AeroXchange, which provides connectivity between airlines and vendors around the world. We have AI tools that didn't exist a couple years ago. We have experience in selling parts. We put all those things together, and what we launched is an AI procurement tool that will automate the purchasing for airlines. We kicked it off at the MRO a couple weeks ago. The reception has been really cool. It's early. It's really early.
We'll tell you more about it, but we were thrilled with the reaction we got from the customer base. Finally, I did wanna touch on our government solutions business that Nick Gross will talk about in a little bit. Everything I described that we do on the commercial side, we also do on the government side. Take, for example, a couple platforms here, the P-8 and the C-40. What are those? Those are 737s. They are commercial derivative aircraft. We've worked on thousands and thousands of 737s for airlines like Southwest, United, et cetera. If you can do it in the commercial world, you can do it in the government world. So we're applying that expertise. Guess what? If you can maintain a 737, you can also maintain an F-16.
We're taking this commercial expertise, and we are applying it in the government space and excited about the possibilities there. Again, we like that balance between government and commercial in the portfolio. I've mentioned a lot of this already, but I did wanna highlight a couple of examples. These businesses, parts, repair, and software, work together very well. I'll take distribution for example. I'll start with OEMs. If we're gonna go in and we're gonna pitch an OEM, and that's where distribution starts, and we're gonna sell an OEM to partner with us for 5 or 10 years to represent their product, being able to say that at OEM, "Hey, guess what? We work on 1,200 aircraft a year in our hangars.
We're supporting 15% of the North American fleet in our hangars. If you're an OEM and you have a new product that replaces a competing product, let's just say you've got a 737 pump you're manufacturing that's gonna replace a competitive pump, and there's 10 of it on an airplane, well, we're gonna work on 800 737s this year. We will literally be at the point of sale on the hangar floor with the airline rep, and we can explain the benefits of pulling the pump off while the aircraft is in check and putting your pump on. That goes far with an OEM. Think about Trax. We are on the desktop of tens of thousands and buyers of planners around the world. They are cutting purchase orders through a system that we own.
If we go in an OEM and say, "Hey, listen, we have visibility to that demand, and we can pump your product through that," that's a proprietary channel to market. A repair activity and a software activity helps a parts activity. Similarly, I mentioned the connection within parts between USM and OEMs. If we have a line of sight and we find out that, hey, you know, 50 A320s or whatever are gonna be torn down in the next three months, that's great intel to share with an OEM because it helps them understand the value of their parts in the aftermarket and may even influence their build cycle. The connection between the USM and the new parts distribution activity is evident. I wanna highlight a connection within repair.
We are now the leaders in airframe heavy maintenance in North America, which is the largest market in the world. We got that way because of our, again, incredible customer relationships, but really our performance on the floor. Our hangar slots are in demand. As you know, we've been expanding our sites. We've bought HAECO, et cetera. We've been expanding, and we still don't have enough capacity to service the demand. We are in a position with our customers, we say, "Hey, listen, we're gonna be competitive on price and turnaround time on the heavy maintenance side." In order to lock up a hangar with us, we would also like to win component work. Remember, component work is higher margin than the hangar work.
We're looking at bundling these things and leveraging our position on the heavy maintenance side to win more component work. Again, of course, if you're working on aircraft, et cetera, you're collecting a lot of data, which helps you inform what parts you're gonna put on the shelves to support the parts business, et cetera, et cetera. I could go on. This is a great collection of businesses that we continue to drive connectivity across, and that's unique in the industry. That leads us to our strategy. Our strategy is really three elements, and my teammates will talk about how each of these applies to their different area. Clearly, we wanna win more core.
We're in a great spot right now, we wanna leverage these customer relationships to win more and drive deeper in terms of what we're doing. Leveraging the platform. I mentioned the connectivity between businesses, leveraging the relationships that we have and this connectivity to win more across all of our business units. I'll give you an example. One of our largest customers today, we are doing over $100 million a year of heavy maintenance business with that customer. We're doing $3 million in component repair. Totally out of balance. Just with that customer, by aligning and making sure that we can sell across disciplines, there's tens of millions of dollars of business that we can achieve with that customer that we already have a relationship with.
That's leveraging the platform. Similarly, there are customers that we sell tens of millions of dollars of parts to, but we do no heavy maintenance. We can cross-sell there and bring them together, leveraging the connectivity of our platform. We wanna scale with discipline. Everyone here should expect that we will continue to make organic investments in the company to grow, and we will also make inorganic investments in the company to grow. We're gonna be disciplined. We have been and will be disciplined about the acquisitions that we make, and we are very focused on curating opportunities, not just reacting to banker-led processes, curating opportunities to build out our parts repair and software disciplines. Okay, I know everything I said doesn't matter, and everybody's just focusing, "All right, what does it mean? What does it mean?
What are the targets? We are updating our 3-year targets from where we were in 2024. I'm gonna call your attention to the right of the slide. We went through the resegmentation, we've got commercial programs, legacy commercial programs, which we're winding down over time. Just to frame that for you, it's a collection of contracts and about $160 million worth of inventory. Those contracts expire, and they will expire, or we will work with the customer to exit sooner. Our plan is to be out of that segment within 3 to 4 years. It frees up a lot of capital, a lot of bandwidth, and it's accretive to our results.
If you set that segment aside, call your attention to the right, forecasting growth, organic growth of 8%-12% over the next three years, adjusted EBITDA margin of 13%-14%+, adjusted EPS CAGR of 15%+, and conversion of EBITDA to operating cash of about 30%. That concludes my prepared remarks. I'm going to turn it over to my esteemed colleague, Chris Jessup, who's going to tell you a little bit about the aviation aftermarket, then we'll go through each one of those business units in detail. We'll take a break in the middle and do Q&A, really appreciate everybody being here. Thank you.
Thanks, John. Good morning, everyone. Chris Jessup, Chief Commercial Officer with AAR. I've been with the company 24 years now. I have a unique history of starting out with a company called ABorn in 2002, which today is our Miami Airframe MRO facility. AAR acquired that location in 2008, I expanded with the company over the years. Heavy sales, marketing background, started repair, evolved in the parts supply, did a little bit of a operational stint in P&L oversight of our Airframe network, before assuming the role that I sit in today in 2017, starting with the Chief Commercial Officer role. Let's just kick off with some strong secular trends that are driving the aftermarket growth that we operate in today.
1, global air travel is resilient, I'm sorry, global air travel growth remains resilient, driving more repair and maintenance cycles. 2, global aircraft fleets are growing and they're aging, which increases the demand for new and used parts. 3, new aircraft deliveries are constrained, 4, supply channels are also constrained. Both those constraints are driving aftermarket demand and the need for an independent solution provider like AAR. Before we go into these in detail, let's first just talk about what makes our market durable and why our independent position helps AAR win in the market and gain market share year over year. When we look at what makes a market durable, 1, you've got essential safety and reliability. Safety is paramount in this industry. It is table stakes for what has to happen day in, day out.
2, reliability. Airlines value the cost of an aircraft out of service at north of $100,000 a day in lost revenue. You'll also hear as we get into some of the data, airlines are stressed with having enough aircraft spares given the market dynamics that are going on with the growing aging fleet and challenges in the new aircraft deliveries. Maintenance is mandatory, number 2. Airlines have got to do the maintenance at defined intervals that are set by the manufacturer and the regulatory authorities that are overseeing those airlines in operation. Third, there's a need for efficiency. Again, we'll talk about this in a few slides coming up, there's competition, cost, and regulatory pressures that are all driving for the need for operational efficiency being paramount. More focus on why independent wins for a few minutes for me.
Neutral industry partner. You know, AAR is able to compete in the market, we are not owned or affiliated by an airline entity, nor are we owned by an OEM for that matter. Airlines increasingly value an independent partner who's able to manage sensitive data, without competitive conflicts. This cannot be more front and center of mind, and you'll hear this from Andy when he comes up and talks about software. When John talks about those three pillars, software really key in this area of neutral industry partnership. Broad industry relationships. This, to me, speaks to what you'll hear from Frank in our parts supply segment. Industry is looking for channel partners that can reach a broad customer base.
You know, we are able to operate in multiple segments of this space, whether it's business general aviation market, whether it's the airlines, you know, a regional carrier, a mainline carrier, international carrier, cargo airlines to lessors, all the way through to OEMs. With our diversified portfolio of service offerings that we carry, we're able to stay relevant and go see customers on a frequent basis. We're not just in there only talking about one topic, one subject matter, one product line. We have the ability to go in there throughout the days, the weeks, the months, the quarters, and stay relevant and informed on market intel and what are the challenges facing airlines on a daily basis. Last, cost and efficiency.
Speed, reliability, and consistency of turnaround times, combined with the ability to leverage data to drive efficiency, speaks wholeheartedly to what you'll hear from Tom when he comes up and speaks about our repair segment of the company. We're in control of a lot of data. Our ability to look at that data, look for ways to preplan parts, you know, what are we gonna be finding when we're overhauling a component or overhauling an aircraft in one of our shops?
How we take lessons learned and modify that workflow to get better and smarter all the way through our investments in the paperless journey to automate a lot of what we're doing in the hangars, and you'll hear Tom talk about that more in detail, is critical and key to our ability to maintain a competitive cost profile and drive efficient operations. Let's now transition to a little bit of detail around the global commercial air travel market and how it remains resilient. Largely global air traffic base supports continued fleet growth and long-term aftermarket demand. Year to date, you're seeing the demand side of the market globally up 1%-2%. You're seeing capacity down 1%-2%.
The key here is those capacity reductions are a function of route profitability, not demand. That is an important distinction to call out. We all know what we're facing in the world right now with the Middle East conflict that has been going on for several weeks now. When you saw IATA put out their March transportation results, it led to a 2.1% rise in demand globally while capacity was down just 1.7%. Even with a shock like that of what's going on in the market, the demand is resilient, you still saw a rise of 2.1% year-over-year for the month of March.
Airlines expect to remain risk-averse to not overly relying on aircraft retirements, and again, on the next slide, we'll dive into more of that in detail, just given the challenges and shortages that are ongoing right now. When you look at the chart on the right, you can see that you've got a very narrow range of 3% in the low side to 5% in the high side, baseline 4%. This really speaks to a structural resilient demand that we're seeing in the market which we operate in today. Transitioning over to the global aircraft fleet. We are currently sitting at around circa 29,000 aircraft in operation today.
The way AAR defines this fleet is we start with regional aircraft, 70 seats or greater, spanning up through narrow body and wide body aircraft is how we get to these numbers. We're sitting at circa 29,000 aircraft today in the market, and when we get out to 2035, we're gonna be around 42,000 aircraft in total. When you look at that whole growth from left to right, that is gonna require over 22,000 aircraft to be manufactured and delivered in that period of time. When we look at 2026 in particular, the market is on pace to deliver around 1,700-1,800 aircraft in this year. When you just do the math for the 9 years remaining, the market needs to continue to scale and drive over 2,200-2,300 aircraft per year.
There's a lot of challenges there. There's a lot that has to be done. Any hiccups that we see in those areas are only gonna further promote a strong demand for the aftermarket services that we provide and that, and that we support. The other interesting thing on this page is, you know, today we're sitting at an average fleet age of 13.4 years. While that's gonna get elevated as we get into 2030 and 2031 at around 14.4 years, even when you get out into 2035, you're still at 14 years of average compared to 13.4 years average today. Again, there's a lot of demand. It's resilient. OEMs have got to do a really good job of making sure they can continue to scale those deliveries.
On the flip side, retirements have been low because of all these challenges. Industry today is only at retiring about 500-600 aircraft per year. Most people talked about the bow wave coming out of COVID, and as OEMs caught up with production, we'd see a huge mass exodus of aircraft retirements. We've not seen that. We've been living in the 500-600 aircraft retirement bandwidth, if you will, for the last couple years. Next year, provided we have a smooth year with the ramp in the deliveries, we should start to tick back up to that 800-900 aircraft retirements per year and hopefully stabilize there again if the OEMs can get up to that 2,200-2,300 aircraft production range.
A lot to watch there as we, as we navigate all this. When we look at the addressable market, as we sit today, and we look at just the parts supply segment, and we look at repair when it comes to both components and modification and maintenance on the airframe side of the house, we view that market at an $80 billion market today, growing to $90 billion by 2029. That's a 4% CAGR, and that's assuming 2026 constant U.S. dollars. There is a lot of swim lanes that we can navigate within just these boxes of parts supply, and MRO component and MRO airframe and modification repairs that we can navigate.
When you look at us today, we are less than a 4% market share of this addressable market, it just translates to a long and bright runway that we have to continue to grow and outpace the market taking shares from our competition. We wanted to break software out separately. You heard John speak about that a few minutes ago. It's a fairly new segment to us in the last 3 years. We're really excited about it. When we look at the foundation of how we got into software, specifically looking at Trax, the core M&E workflow area, we view that addressable market at $3 billion today. It's a very fragmented landscape with consolidation occurring.
Many of you will find it interesting that a lot of airlines around the world that have not decided to upgrade and move to more of the emerging softwares like Trax are still operating on 1970s, 1980s era technology software that's just been kinda updated slowly, if you will. When you look at the world we live in with advancements in AI, the need to go off premises to cloud hosting, to the need for mobile apps, the need to connect channels, there's a lot of investment needed in those areas, and we're really excited about where we sit in that space, and you'll hear a little bit more from Andy as we get into that. More importantly, if you look at the bottom bullet, the planning and the procurement represents an additional multi-billion opportunity for us.
We look at Aerostrat and what we did to move into the planning software, expanding out of those maintenance and engineering workflows. The recent Airvoyant launch, where we're now moving into procurement and marketplace. It really helps us tie things in, if you will, end to end. Our overall view is software is not a standalone product. We view that connecting software with the parts and the repair strategy is going to make those using it a much more informed decision-making process. You're going to be able to navigate decisions at quicker speeds and with better outcomes on cost. Shifting priorities over to the government sector for a few minutes here. You know, just like there is positive demand signals for the commercial sector, same is true for government.
The presidential budget for FY 2027 when compared to FY 2026 is showing a 7%-9% growth in budget spend year-over-year. You can see the breakout on this slide between the different services, whether it's the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, or the Army. There is heavy spend in those high single digits being planned. The biggest thing that you'll hear Nick talk about when we get into that in more detail is there's a big shift in focus from acquisition to sustainment and overall aircraft readiness. More importantly, we've got a lot of good track record in the last few years with that defense base being stressed on how we continue to grow and meet the 7%-9% budget increase utilizing commercial best practices.
You'll hear Nick go into detail about a few of those things that we've been able to expand across our whole pillars to help us succeed there. Not only in the U.S. market are we seeing a positive high 7%-9% growth rate, we're also seeing positive trends in the international markets as well. You've got Europe in particular, whose average of 2% GDP spend on their defense budget being pushed to get up to 5%, defense spends. You also have the Indo-Pacific region looking to spend, accelerate with what's going on in the world as well. There's a positive view overall, whether it's commercial or whether it's defense.
I would just say, in summary, as I wrap up my slides, when you take that all together and you look at our focus of leveraging our independent position to be able to market parts, repair and software to a commercial and to a government sector, it leads to a very attractive growth, category and segment for AAR, to continue to grow in market share. With that, I will wrap up, and I will turn it over to Frank Landrio, who will go into parts supply for us.
Thank you, Chris. I'm Frank Landrio, Senior Vice President of Distribution. I will be presenting the parts supply segment with a focus on the new parts distribution business. Before I begin, quick background for me. I'm in my twentieth year at AAR, 35 years of industry experience, held various leadership roles in areas such as finance, accounting, M&A, operations, OEM development, and 3 years ago, I took on the role of leading our new parts distribution business.
Where are you from, Frank?
I'm just gonna say New York. If you couldn't tell. I'm Italian, too. You'd see that. Okay, key messages. We're a large global independent parts provider. I will touch upon the financials, the market position, the size, and our ability to capitalize on a growing aviation market. We will then go to differentiated offering. This is in the new parts business, two-way exclusive distribution model that John started to define. I'll go a step further beyond the definition, but our distribution structure, as well as our value proposition, is what's resonating right now in the market. You've seen. I know we had a couple conversations during breakfast. You've seen the growth, and there's a lot more to go.
That lead to the third point, which is the growth strategy. Where do we take the business from this point forward? Okay. Our parts supply segment has delivered strong results over the last 12 months. Sales of $1.4 billion, 30% growth year-over-year. $200 million of adjusted EBITDA, that's 42% growth year-over-year, and 14.7% adjusted EBITDA margin, which is 123 basis points improvement. It's made up of two businesses. That's the new parts distribution and our USM, used serviceable material. On the new parts business, about 65% of the total, $900 million of LTM sales. On a run rate basis, we're over $1 billion from that standpoint.
Mainly the commercial and government markets is what we serve. 90% of our OEM agreements are exclusive in nature, and we renewed 100% of our contracts over the last several years. On the USM side, makes up 35% of the total, about $500 million in LTM sales. We are the largest independent provider of USM in both engine and airframe components, and we demonstrate our value by providing cost savings and industry-leading availability to our customers globally. A little deeper dive now into parts distribution overview. We distribute over 35,000 parts to 2,500 customers, major airlines like Delta, United, major government customers, as for example, Defense Logistics Agency here in the U.S., and the Japanese Ministry of Defense, and major MROs like Lufthansa Technik.
Value proposition benefits both our customers and our OEMs. From a customer standpoint, we simplify complexity is probably the best way of putting this. We do that by fast delivery, reduced inventory costs, and a single point of contact for a range of parts. For OEMs, we provide access to the customers. We provide global scale and proprietary market intelligence, which I'll go into a little bit deeper. We have our proven execution of our two-way exclusive distribution model, which is kind of the umbrella over all of the value offerings. Let's do a little deeper dive into what that means. The two-way exclusive distribution model, as John told you.
This is where we partner with an OEM, and we agree not to distribute a competing product or product line, and in exchange, they would partner only with us. What does that allow us to do? It allows us to invest in the relationship. What they get for that, and what we've implemented over the three years, is a market-driven value proposition. It's all about the process and how we gain our market intelligence. Think about everything you've heard so far from both John and Chris. We're a global company, market intelligence coming from whether it's commercial markets, military markets, whether it's coming from our component shops, our heavy maintenance shops, even our software businesses. It's that market intelligence that's important.
It allows us to figure out the market share for each OEM by product, by product line, and the gap to get the rest of the business, right? Let's use 100% as that. It's that gap that we focus in on. That's where the strategy comes in. That's where we come in and we figure out maybe it's bundling OEMs, maybe it's, you know, PMA threats. There's a long list of actions, by the way. We customize that to gain that market share back for our OEM and of course, with AAR. That's resonated a lot with our OEMs and AAR. What I would tell you, it sounds somewhat simple, right? You'd say, well, you just get the market intelligence, just go get the other 30% or 40%.
It's the team that we have that, one, could get that intelligence and then execute that strategy. You can't just say it and it just happens, right? We have demonstrated that by the numbers and you'll see some more of this in a couple of slides. That is the core to our growth. Another differentiator for us, and I just mentioned some of it, is that AAR distribution is part of the fully integrated platform, and we work together. OEMs work with a lot of the other parts of AAR already, there's a reciprocal arrangement here that, again, the market intelligence and how we could work with those OEMs, whether it's on the heavy maintenance side or the component side or the government solution side. That's a differentiator for us, and it provides a lot of value.
Then we roll that all together with our digital tools. We have customized proprietary digital tools that make it easy for customers and OEMs to work with us. In addition to that, I'll add the whole Trax and the software that we're working with on Airvoyant and how we bring those OEMs to the desktop of all the airline customers that are out there today. This is the structure of distribution. I'll go through each one of these. This structure lends itself. It's an intricate part of our growth strategy. Each of these market verticals, and again, I'll go through all five of them, are standalone businesses. We're not just dabbling in this, in each one of these segments. They're standalone businesses. They all share the same value proposition, so we're not changing value propositions.
What we're changing is how you go to market in each one of these. They all have their own infrastructure. They have people, experts, I'll say, in that, in each market. They have the investment, the inventory, and then the individual systems from a market capture standpoint. For each one, so let's take commercial, starting with commercial. We have a global technical sales force that is strategically positioned around the world. Again, it's the market intelligence. They know what the markets are doing. They bring that intelligence to us. We figure out what those strategies are. We deploy it back to them, and then they go and execute. Again, just an awesome team in how they do that.
On the defense side, same thing here. We have a Captains of Industry contract, only non-OEM to have that. We have a DLA Supply Chain Alliance, both on the land and maritime and aviation. You couple that all together, only non-OEM to have that. What that does for us is again about market intelligence to capture. We're close to the customer. We're able to take that information and then relay it back to our OEMs, and we strategize again how to capture that market efficiently. Next is business general aviation. We called this out in 2023. Independent sales force also. Huge growth. It's been growing, but a lot more to go. Japanese military.
This is a unique opportunity that we had. Again, instead of dealing with it on a transactional basis, we know it needed a lot more infrastructure. We invested in a joint venture, and this growth has been an enormous growth for us. Those four are all aftermarket serving. The piece that was missing, but it was part of our strategy, was, we wanted to help the OEMs on the supply chain side. We acquired ADI, as you probably remember, September of 2025. This is where this tucks in. It started out on electronics, but we're looking to broaden it to other parts. This is just tip of the iceberg. I mean, they've been doing well, there's a lot more to go here.
Again, helping OEMs, as we all know, about the supply chain constraints out there, this is going to be a focal point for us. As many of us know on the larger OEMs, they're structured like this. Many OEMs just not in one market, right?
Their parts go across many of these markets. I would tell you right now, we have 10 or more OEMs that are in 2 or more of these market verticals, and we have 1 now that's across all 5. Those opportunities today are active. We are talking to our current OEMs, we're executing, and we are expanding across these market verticals. When you execute the value prop and the structure, you wind up with results like this. Over the last 3 years, you could see that aggressive growth. We've added 25 new product lines. We've added CAGR for that period of time is 28% and a 100% renewal rate for the last several years. 1 point I always like to bring out is you'll see the same OEM logo repeated.
That is new product lines or new business. It's not just repeat business. I will also point out that some of those OEMs going back to 2012 and 2013 and 2014 are still with us today. That's a testament of execution. You'll start to see new names here over the last 3 years, and that's because in our business development pitch They resonate with what I've just said. They want somebody who partners with them, who helps them grow that piece that they're looking for, right? We're not just stocking, we're not just being a distributor, we're a strategic aftermarket partner and not just a distributor.
When you look at our market size now, right? Some of the key market drivers, I'll start with that. You know, airlines, you got oil prices, we talked about that already. They wanna reduce cost, they wanna de-stock inventory, they wanna improve the supplier reliability from a parts standpoint. On an OEM side, they have supply chain challenges. They're gonna have them for the foreseeable future. We've talked about this. Everybody says it will end in 3 to 5 years. I don't know, I think it's gonna go on longer than that.
What's increasingly happened, they are talking to companies like AAR where they're saying, "I used to go direct, I think now I want to go and embrace the distribution model." Although we have critical scale here at $900 million, over $1 billion, we're still only 4% of our addressable market at $25 billion. A long way to go here, a lot of runway in front of us. Now we go to the growth strategy. Where do we go from here? First thing I want to reiterate is our core business is growing still. We don't need to look at these other options. I want to make sure that we're very clear that our core business is absolutely growing at a healthy rate.
In addition to that, we wanna further penetrate adjacent aftermarket opportunities, which includes our business general aviation, foreign militaries, where we're very selective in what regions of the world we'll work in, but huge opportunities. We're gonna keep driving international expansion, mainly on a commercial side. APAC region has been a huge region for us, but there's a lot more to go, and we'll be strategic about that. To expand the OEM supply, I just mentioned on the supply chain constraints, we could play a bigger role with our OEMs on the supply side, and the ADI acquisition obviously gives us that critical mass. Now as we execute our growth strategy, we wanna be very disciplined. I think John brought that up about being disciplined. We're already doing that in our business, where we're using tools and increasing automation.
We're looking at our workflow to get more throughput in a very efficient way. We wanna maintain our margins and grow them as we grow the top line. Okay. Let me go back. Sorry. Let me put it in summary here. I believe we have the right strategy, we have the right model, we have the right structure. More importantly, we have the right team. The team and the results that you've seen, they're executing. They understand the mission, they understand the market intelligence, what it's needed, what to do with it, and how to execute it. I am very, I think we're going to just gain more market share for the foreseeable future. I'll leave it at that. Thank you very much. Next is Tom Hofer. Tell us about repair and engineering. All right, good morning.
My name is Tom Hofer. I'm the Senior Vice President of Repair and Engineering. I've been with AAR about 3 years. Prior to that, I was at GE Aviation for 32 years. I survived Jack Welch, and I also learned some things from Larry Culp. All good. I'm also a retired Chief Master Sergeant from the Air National Guard. You know, 3 years ago, again, my first Investors Day, I was 2 months into the role. I was just talking slides, right? I'm still grateful no one asked any questions back then, 'cause I had the, like, depth of a petri dish back then. Thank you. Deeper now, and a lot has been accomplished since then.
That was the cool part about preparing for this, is, you know, sometimes you forget what happened in the past year, past two years, three years. When I looked back and we talked about, "These are the strategies we're going to go after. These are the things we're gonna do." Now to look and see that we actually did them, we executed. Our say-do ratio is, like, 100%. It was super exciting, super energizing. I can't wait to share with my team because they probably forget too everything they've been doing. Pretty cool stuff that we've again reflected on the past months preparing for this. Repair, $950 million business in a very highly fragmented $50 billion market.
You gotta deliver, you gotta be laser-focused on your customer, you gotta deliver on safety, quality, delivery, and cost every day. In addition to that, we are part of the integrated group. You know, component MRO, same customers as Frank. Frank talked about the OEM relationship, super important on component MRO. Andy will talk about software. We provide data for software. Nick will talk about government solutions. We support Nick's group with repairing the Navy P-8, the Marine C-40, and we also do some flight testing with the U.S. Navy E-6. We are all together, looking to win, and we also know when we win, we all win together. A pretty cool culture that John has created. All right, key messages that I'm gonna cover today.
Number one, in this highly fragmented market, we are the number one leading independent global provider. Even though it's highly fragmented, I'll talk about the size of that market and how much we play. We lead independently with the MRO, so I'm repeating myself, but we deliver high quality, safe products with a lot of labor efficiency and industry-leading turnaround time. Our offering is differentiated. Again, labor efficiency, turnaround time, deep experience with our workforce, and a global footprint that is tied to what our customers need. Our growth strategy has been very profitable. We deliver that growth through different value propositions, both on component and airframe. We've added capacity with HAECO and also organically with Oklahoma City and Miami. We are constantly developing more solutions for the next-gen engines and airframes.
Finally, margin expansion. The efficiencies and productivities that we see both through mix and our productivity improvements, a focus on lean, and investments in digital solutions like our paperless hangar system, have proven to be margin accretive to the airframe and component MRO businesses. The segment that you saw announced last week, Repair, Engineering, and Software, $1 billion in LTM sales, $127 million in EBITDA LTM, and 12.7% margins. You see the parentheses, we do not like parentheses. That small blip on the BPS is driven by the HAECO acquisition. I'll talk later about the integration and where we are with that.
We're clearly on a path to make that parentheses go away and make the HAECO sites, Greensboro and Lake City, which have been a slight drag on our margins, they will be margin accretive as planned and why we made that acquisition. Making up the segment, Airframe MRO, $575 million of LTM sales. Focused, like John mentioned, on narrow body and regional jets, 737, A320s, E175s. It's a product focus, and it's also a customer focus because of the geographic concentration of narrow bodies and regional jets in North America. It also has provided us great efficiency gains with our workforce, our technicians, they come in every day and they know they're gonna be working on a narrow body.
There are obvious benefits to that when you work on the same product day in, day out, you get really good at it. We have multi-year agreements with those blue-chip customers that extend well into 2030. Our proprietary operating model delivers superior performance. We deliver all of that from eight heavy maintenance facilities across the U.S. and Canada. Component MRO, $375 million of LTM sales, focus on engine accessories, structures, and components. We pride ourselves on high value, very complex repairs that are created by our engineering teams working with OEMs, and we enjoy really strong OEM relationships with the likes of GE, Boeing, Woodward, Collins, which enables us to do those engineering development. We also have a growing portfolio of DER repairs where OEMs do not provide that. We deliver all that from six facilities globally.
Finally, software. Welcome Andy and the team to our segment. $50 million of LTM sales. You might say, "Why is software in this segment?" MRO, fleet management, procurement software. Andy's gonna talk a lot about that. There are some synergies that really get us super excited about what those solutions are going to enable from a digital standpoint. Repairs, just flat out about execution. Execution for our customers, we got to meet them where they are and meet them where what they expect us to do. 7 million labor hours annually. Beneath this number is a pretty cool stat, actually. 7 million because of the acquisition, right? Greensboro and Lake City added about 1.6 million hours to that.
In the previous 3 years with the same footprint, same capacity, our team went from 5 million hours to 5.3 to 5.5. That's throughput, that's execution without expanding our footprint. It's also why we're expanding our footprint, because we know we're really good at this. 1,000 aircraft serviced annually and 15,000 components. The value prop, you know, reads pretty consistent with what you would expect from a repair business. Decades of experience, customer focus, global footprint, differentiated offerings. I'll take you back to the very top 1, industry-leading labor efficiency and turnaround times driven by continuous improvement and meeting again what our customers' expectations are and driving to exceed those expectations. It is all about turnaround times, right? The biggest financial lever in this business is turning aircraft back to our customers. Right?
It means revenue for them, and it means they are very happy customer, and they'll send us more aircraft. Some of you may be familiar with D checks, C checks. I see some familiar faces from the Miami visit you saw and were able to go through a couple of the aircraft. These C checks and D checks are required by regulatory requirements, right? C checks every 1 to 3 years, D checks every 6 to 10 years. We also do modifications beyond that, whether it's cabin reconfigs, we're doing Starlink installations now, so we have that flexibility. The primary core of our business is C checks and D checks. We've reduced those turnaround times by almost 15% in the past couple of years. We are focused on that, right? Maintenance, visits, taking days out. We've implemented Kaizen.
We've done over 75 Kaizen events. Over 200 projects are in process across our network, we got our proprietary paperless hangar system, which also has yielded efficiency and productivity gains. Finally, you may recall or you may not recall, we had the first safety management system implemented by an independent MRO in the entire world. Customer benefits, like I said, nothing more important, right? Getting their aircraft back, flying, passengers on it, paying money to fly, that's revenue. Improved first-time yield quality. Again, by reducing our quality escapes and our damages, we get a quality aircraft back to the customer, they make money, and a safe quality product is always top of mind for both of us. Benefits for us, if we get more aircraft through, that's good for us too.
Like I mentioned, 5 to 5.3 to 5.5 million hours in the same footprint. Now we're at 7 million with the acquisition. That's more revenue for AAR, it expands our customer relationships, right? If my team does well, Nick does well. If my team does well, Andy does well. If my team does well, Frank does well. We all win because we all have the same customers. Those customers, if they're happy with what they're getting from an airframe MRO standpoint or a component MRO, it makes the conversation a lot easier for Christopher Jessup to have when he's in front of a customer. Since last Investors Day, 16% CAGR. Very proud of those results, but we've been super busy also, like I mentioned at the very beginning.
In March of 2024, we acquired the Triumph Product Support business. November of 2025, we acquired HAECO Americas. 2 weeks ago, we closed the acquisition of Aircraft Reconfig Technologies, or ART. We also, as John mentioned, divested of a non-core business, landing gear. We're expanding our footprint, or have expanded our footprint in Oklahoma City. I'll talk a little more about the expansions in Oklahoma City and Miami in 2 slides here. The additional revenue streams from enhancing our offerings, like I said, being very flexible with what the airline customers need while their airplanes come in for C checks and D checks, and doing more than just that. Also on the component side, developing, like I said, more complex and advanced solutions.
Operational excellence, you know, just nailing it on lean, the paperless hangar I'll talk about, and SMS. As I opened, crazy big market, $50 billion, very fragmented, and with all we're doing well and everything we've been doing, we still only have 2% market share. Huge runway, huge opportunity for us to continue to go after, and it's real, right? The market size is real, and we believe the market drivers that Chris touched on are real also. Air travel's increasing, which means there's more demand for airlines to have their planes and have them back, and have a quality plane back. Regulations are not going away, right? Regular maintenance is required. Fleets continue to age every day, and the delivery constraints on new aircraft still remain. Finally, 4, limited network capacity.
Let me take a moment to talk about the acquisitions. You know, John mentioned we've been very busy acquiring and doing a lot of really cool strategic acquisitions, three of which have been in the business that I'm responsible to lead. Number 1, Triumph Product Support. Again, March of 2024, $725 million value, and we've realized about $21 million in cost synergies. In addition to those cost synergies, we've unlocked a lot of new repair capabilities. We've got much more increased presence in the Asia-Pacific with our Thailand facility, and we can serve our customers better with Thailand, Amsterdam, and our facilities in the U.S. The business has been successfully integrated into our portfolio, and like I said, delivering some really nice synergies there.
ART, Aircraft Reconfig Technologies, smaller in size, but not smaller in strategic importance. A $35 million dollar value, 100+ employees, which is almost 3 times the size of the pre-engineering services business, right? This is a big one for us and for that business unit within my team. The exciting part about this is with those 100 employees, we also pick up 100 STCs, supplemental type certificates. Sorry, 400 STCs, 100 PMAs, Parts Manufacturing Approvals, and 33 patents. We picked up a really nice group of smart people who know what they're doing.
Big pipeline. There's revenue synergies with the pipeline that we also acquired from this business, and we believe there's cost synergies from the ODA self-certification that we have now to certify our own PMAs and STCs, but also in-house manufacturing that's been outsourced to date to make the monuments and the cabin reconfig products that go into our engineering solutions. Pretty excited about this one. HAECO Americas, you all know about this one. to me, the strategic rationale on this one was almost crystal clear, it was crystal clear, right? We needed more hangar capacity. Our customers needed more hangar capacity. Greensboro is absolutely huge, and Lake City's also got a nice footprint. We picked up capacity to meet that customer demand. It's in North America, where we like to operate, narrow bodies, right? Narrow bodies in E175.
North America, again, where our core customers are, and we're asking for, "We need more space. We need you to do more work for us." It deepened those customer relationships. We found, while looking at this business, that a lot of the customers were already customers we had on the airframe MRO side. The opportunity for synergies, we saw that, there was a clear opportunity for us to apply the AAR operating model, our systems, our procedures, and really take a, I'd say, a low-profit business to more the levels of what we expect. Like I mentioned at the very beginning, it's a little bit of a drag right now, but we're well on our way to make it very profitable. Three pieces of that playbook, revenue optimization.
Chris and his team went out and secured $850 million in contracts. Takes us to 2030. We knew, all right, we're gonna get this new footprint, and we can fill it up, and customers are gonna come, and now they're committed. Cost reductions and process improvements. We've already replaced all the old IT systems that were at Greensboro and Lake City, put our systems in place, and those are all operating, and we will go paperless in Greensboro here in the next few months. We also had to adjust the cost structure. There was a lot of, I'd say, just different approach to business, right? Volume was good no matter what kind. That's not how we work.
We like to, I'd say, rationalize the volume to where we know we can run an operation how we wanna run it and be profitable. That's where we're well on a path to do that. The footprint rationalization, you know, as a result of this acquisition, we are exiting the Indianapolis facility. It was our highest cost facility. But just by nature of that, we're reducing our total airframe MRO cost structure by exiting Indy and moving most of that work to what were the HAECO sites. The improvements are clear. We had a review with a very big customer a couple weeks ago from a safety, quality, delivery standpoint. They shared with us, "Hey, we're feeling the change.
We see and you can sense the change when you walk out of the hangar. We are well on our way to again, doing what we said we were going to do. We were going to acquire this business, apply our operating process procedures, and make it as profitable as the rest of our facilities. Inorganic growth, organic growth. You've heard about the expansions. We're super excited about this also. Oklahoma City opened up for business on March 1, rolled in the first customer aircraft, and things are going great. As you would imagine, it's like when you get a new house, the team loves working there, right? We were able to select the guys that were going to, guys and ladies, I should say, that are working in the new facility.
200,000 square feet between Oklahoma City and Miami. Miami will open in September. Incremental revenue with the same fixed base cost, this is all margin accretive. Customer demand was there. Like I said, it's already spoken for. The labor pools at these 2 facilities is another big reason why we did this. We have great labor pools in Oklahoma City and Miami, and fully expect us to be able to add the technicians that we need to execute and deliver for our customers. More organic growth, components. Adding repair capabilities for next-gen components. Capabilities on LEAP, GTF, NEO, MAX. These are a result of the OEM relationships we have and also the engineering expertise that we've built.
The second, the middle piece there you see, we quickly discovered that we had to have really good engineers in order to work with the OEMs who, quite frankly, also needed us, right? With all the new or next-gen engines and airframes coming to the market, they just don't have the capacity to keep repairing the older aircraft and engines. We added engineering expertise. We've collaborated with several of those OEMs to develop these complex, very highly valued repairs, and that part of the business is really doing well. This speaks again to the third one around these OEM relationships. You cannot do OEM repairs without the OEM working with you, right? They own the IP, they own the manuals, and they'd like to keep that.
It really speaks to the need and the value of having those OEM partnerships, which again ties back to Frank doing well for them, right? Andy working with them, et cetera, so we can have those relationships and that they're strong from an AAR standpoint, so we can work together with those OEMs to deliver. PMA/DER. Customers have told us over and over again, I'm sure a lot of you know this, there are challenges out there and supply chain constraints. Supply chain is not coming back from COVID, right? This is the new normal. You hear all those taglines, if you will, about what's going on with supply chain. They've come to many companies out there, now us, and saying, "Hey, how can you help us with You know, we don't have availability.
We can't do these repairs. Competitors struggle with just doing the repairs. Our solution is PMA/DER. Again, Parts Manufacturing Approval/Designated Engineering Representative. We're working with our own engineering teams. We can and have and are going to continue to develop these repairs that are proprietary for us, but FAA-approved, again, to address this customer need of they just need parts, they need components, and they can't get them right now. The outcomes are parts availability, increased uptime, predictable lower cost outcomes, and then for us, some improved margins without additional fixed costs. We're doing this within our fixed cost structure of component repair.
Paperless hangar. Super proud about this. The picture says it, right? I mean, and some of you saw this in Miami. Actually, I think you saw it after we had already got rid of the planning room, right? That's a picture of it. Tons of paper gone, right? The resources and cost required to administer all that paper. By the way, 9 million pieces of paper saved since we went paperless. We're saving trees, we're saving space, and you know, we have technicians walking around with tablets now. I should say, not walking around as much. Used to have to go to a home base, get their assignments for the day, go complete the assignment, go back, get another one. Now it's all on the tablet. Decreased downtime for our customers. Maintenance turnaround times have improved. All these digital records enhances our ability to have records about safety, quality, compliance.
You see the margin improvement of 200 basis points. 38% of our network is currently paperless. That's 100% of Miami and Rockford. Oklahoma City will be by August. Our plan now with our digital technology team is to have the entire network paperless by the end of FY 2027. This gets us super excited. We're seeing, again, big efficiency gains. Our technicians absolutely love this system. I think beyond all these numbers and savings from a retention and retention and recruitment standpoint, this is how you get new technicians, right? 'Cause when the newer generation, younger generation shows up and you give them a book, a manual of this is how you do your job, they're literally gone.
Having it on a tablet, this is how you work in a digital world. We're seeing the impact also on our stability of our workforces at those facilities. Wrapping up, expanding hangar capacity. Meet the customer where they need us to be. The demand is there. We're expanding capacity both inorganically at HAECO Americas, organically with Oklahoma City and Miami. Utilizing our range of repairs, both on the airframe and component standpoint.
Again, we need to stay flexible. Again, meet the customer where they are. They're asking for Starlink installations now, as I mentioned before, which is pretty cool. If you've ever flown on a Starlink aircraft, you're happy we're doing that. It is amazing. We're doing those. Geographic expansions. We're always looking at expansions, right? We know our biggest competition, especially on the airframe MRO side, is lower cost, I'd say countries and places where you enjoy a lower cost of labor. We've also been approached to look at potential wide-body solutions where companies are looking to reduce their exposure to the China region.
We have invested, we will invest in service next-gen components and efficiencies. Like I said, that's the name of the game. Digital solutions, whether it's paperless, tying in with Andrew Schmidt's team, with, he talked about Aerostrat. Our customers use Aerostrat. When I heard the news we acquired Aerostrat, I was excited because I literally get screen prints of Aerostrat fleet schedules from our customers, and I'm confident Andy and his team are gonna help me digitize that, right? Look, it's sustainable growth, it's margin accretion, and a strong return on invested capital. That's how we're gonna continue, have been growing. It's how we're gonna continue to grow. That completes, I think, the first half. Q&A time, right? There's the man.
Thanks, Tom. Thank you everyone. Just a quick reminder, as we get into Q&A here, please state your name before you ask your question. Also a friendly reminder to please keep your questions to the sections we just discussed. Dylan's obviously gonna go into the financial framework in more detail later, so if we can hold those as well. Appreciate it.
Drink.
There we go.
It's right there. Sorry, my mouth's dry as a bone. Thank you. Talk too much without swallowing. Oh.
Okay. Yeah. Questions on the first half. Ken.
Yeah, thank you, John.
Yeah.
As you think about your 10% sort of top line outlook, you know, excluding the legacy commercial services piece, can you give any more detail as to how we should think about that, either by segment or for some of the broader buckets, heavy MRO, component MRO, maybe parts distribution versus USM?
Sure, we can. If it's okay, I'd like to talk about the framework, after Dylan goes at the end, just 'cause he was gonna go into more detail on a lot of assumptions. If we can pick that back up.
Yeah.
I know you'll ask it again.
Okay, perfect. Well, maybe if I could, on the parts supply segment, can you talk about, for the industry today, what % do you see going through distribution? How does that look in 5 years? Because I think it's a nice secular sort of industry tailwind. You're obviously taking share. What's the environment like? What are the conversations like with OEM partners? Why are they looking to go more through distribution? How do you see that market evolving, and obviously, your ability to continue to take share in that?
Sure. I can start. Then Frank, you wanna fill it in?
Go ahead.
You know, generally speaking, obviously, we've been taking share, and I'd like to remind everybody that I think about our two biggest competitors, you know, the combined revenue of our two largest competitors is about $6 billion or $7 billion. We got a lot of runway from where we are at $1 billion, roughly, in distribution to, you know, where we can get to relative to certain of our competitors. We do see a trend amongst the OEMs that we talk to of being more confident in distribution and looking at that at a more efficient way to approach the market.
We have been shaking share, but what we've also found is that when we get into an OEM, they say, "Okay, you know, we're gonna give you this market to focus on, and you're gonna focus on that, but we're still direct over here." Over time, they see the efficiency with which we approach that market, and they'll move more work that's direct over to us. Frank, do you wanna?
I'd like to add that 50% of our growth has been where OEMs have gone direct. I think they're looking at the market and saying, "How can I serve it better?" I think they're going back to investing in new technology, producing parts and whatever, but not trying to increase their sales force, for example. Increase on the military side, hold inventory for the DLA, for example, when there's better companies that are equipped already to do this and give them that return.
Great. If I could, just one follow-up. On the PMA DER piece, can you size that for us? Then just moving forward, how are you gonna better continue to manage sort of conflict between that and your OEM partners, if that's at all an issue?
Sure. PMA is still very small. You're talking about single digit millions in terms of revenue inside the portfolio. What we are excited about with the ART acquisition is now we've got this ODA capability, and we can self-certify, we can bring PMAs faster to market. That's important. It would still, from an organic standpoint, be a, you know, it might be high growth, but it's gonna be small in terms of its, you know, percentage of the total. In terms of conflict, there are lots of parts out there that we can go after, lots of parts that are not in conflict with our distribution partners. We are not concerned about finding areas to PMA.
I'd like to remind everybody, I think Tom may have mentioned it, our biggest product line is window shades. You know, we're selling millions of dollars of PMA window shades each year. You know, I've got 4 young sons, and every time we're on an aircraft, I'm telling them to pull those things out and stab them with a pen, et cetera, so that we can replace them. You know, interior parts like that are low tech, high margin, and not in conflict with any of the OEMs we work with.
Thanks. Let's go to Scott.
Hey, John. Quick question on the parts supply business. You have about 4% market share right now. Still a lot of room to grow. If we think 3-5 years from now, where do you see your market share, and do you view that industry as ripe for consolidation?
Interesting set of questions. I'd like to pick up a couple points in market share over that period of time. Frank and I talk about, hey, listen, it's a $1 billion business today. There's no reason why it shouldn't be a $2 billion business. As you know, we have been growing meaningfully faster than the market. We've been putting up 25%, 30% organic growth in that business the last several years. We would expect, you know, above-market growth to continue and therefore end up with a couple points of market share. Excited about that.
In terms of consolidation, yes, I think there have been and will be consolidation opportunities for us, not necessarily just in the end market distribution space, but also the electronics world that we, where we made the ADI acquisition, and that's a whole new growth vector for us. Now we're selling parts to the OEMs themselves for use in manufacture as opposed to distributing end products, which is the core business today.
Great.
Sheila.
Sorry.
Thank you.
Scott Blumenthal from Emerald Advisors.
Hey, Scott.
My question is for Frank. Frank, it hasn't been lost on us that your parts supply business really started to accelerate after the acquisition of Trax. Maybe you can give us a few examples of how you've been able to leverage Trax to drive the business till now.
Well, I think we're just starting on a Trax front. I think what we had to do is first prove out our model that I spoke about, right? Execution of our model, everything from the market intelligence piece, which is a differentiator, leveraging the team. Now what we're doing is we're working with Airvoyant and Trax to now bring that model and those OEMs into the Trax system. This is an ongoing event right now.
I would say it's coincidence that the business started to accelerate when we bought Trax. It's not necessarily related. Trax can be a, and will be a, accelerant going forward now that we've got it integrated and connected, and particularly with Airvoyant.
Thanks. Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies. Maybe, John, if you could talk about the parts distribution market, and you mentioned in your strategy slide, business and general aviation as your third growth lever. You know, your business mix is currently commercial and defense. How do you think about leaning into BG&A, what the growth rate looks like in that market, and how do you think about expanding share?
Yeah, good question. The four areas, commercial, we've been growing significantly there. We've also seen accelerated growth in the defense market, very happy with the position there and expect that growth to continue. We do very little in BG&A today. It's relatively small. That market has consolidated in a way where it now makes sense for us to pursue, meaning that in the business jet world, you now have large fleets concentrated with fractional operators, et cetera, where we are set up to be able to go after them. We see that as a meaningful growth opportunity. You know, to size that as a percentage, it could grow faster than the core, commercial and defense, but that's another area where we would look at inorganic opportunities, as well to build a bigger presence. I don't know, Frank, if you wanna add anything there.
The only thing I'll say, it's a fragmented market, right? We needed the tools in order to capitalize on that, and we have those now, I think the growth will be continuing on at this point.
Great. Scott.
Scott Blumenthal from Emerald Advisors. We gotta ask Tom a question because last time he got off scott-free.
I did. That's right.
Right. Yeah, Tom, you referred to the Thailand and Amsterdam facilities. You have Beachhead and, you know, APAC and also in Europe.
Yeah.
We don't really hear too much about them. How can you kinda leverage those and grow in those areas as well?
Yeah. I'd say a lot of the focus is on Thailand and growing the capacity and the footprint there, Scott. It's a unique facility where, meaning at the U.S. facilities, they concentrate on edge components or structures, right? Or airframe components. At Thailand, they can do it all. And they do it well. It's a very young and energetic and pretty fired up workforce, highly educated. Our, yeah, our strategy there is grow the footprint and expand all the capabilities that we have there.
Are you at capacity then?
No, not yet.
Hey, Ken.
Maybe 2 questions then. On the heavy MRO side in particular, how far out are you sold? Like, what are you seeing in terms of bookings today from your customers? Related to that, obviously, I know you've addressed this multiple times, John, but if you think about sort of the higher crude pricing and ultimately impact on your business or the market in general, where would you start to see that? Like, how would you think about your portfolio and sort of what's backlog driven, what's short cycle? Just anything else around that as you think about some of the scenario planning I'm sure you're going through back half of this year and into 2027.
Sure. Two questions there. From a heavy maintenance standpoint, we're sold out essentially through the end of the decade. We've got customer commitments through 2030. That's unique. Our competitors do not have that level of commitment. There are, you know, minimums in terms of hours that are guaranteed to us by our customers, and certainly, if we have capacity, they can do more. We've got, we're sold out through the end of the decade, which is a good position to be in. As it relates to, you know, if we think about past cycles where we would see things, we would see it in the daily parts volume first.
That's where you would actually see it in the business first in terms of if there was gonna be a slowdown. We have not seen that. Across our parts businesses, volume has remained very, very steady, and, you know, we're continuing to see growth. We haven't seen that. Where you would hear it first, though, this would be your first indication, would be the signals, the demand signals from the customers around heavy maintenance. In other words, you know, the hangars go down a little bit in the summer. It's seasonal because the aircraft fly. Then, usually, you know, then you'd fill back up in the fall.
You would be seeing things from the customer saying, "Hey, we were gonna give you this many aircraft in the fall, but you're gonna see a little bit less." We have not heard those demand signals from our customers either. You'd hear it in heavy maintenance, but you'd see it in parts. Again, at this moment, you know, we're still feeling very good.
Any other questions? Scott.
All right. Tom, I'm sorry. Frank, what's your expectation for part supply growth once all of the capacity is up and running fully at both Oklahoma and Miami? You know, I guess, is there a direct correlation between the amount of capacity and what we can expect in, kind of, I guess parts and MRO pull through once all those facilities are up and online?
Operationally.
So-
Yeah, it's more.
Maybe some clarity there. In the Airframe MRO, our team does its own purchasing and material. A lot of them, some of the material is also customer furnished. We're not connected into Frank's business from a part supply standpoint. We do that within each of the MROs. I mean, the part supply will naturally grow because we'll have more aircraft, right? We have three additional lines in Oklahoma City and three in Miami. It's incremental to I don't know the exact numbers, but it's incremental to overall revenue and our profit because the material that comes from the natural repair cycle.
Yeah.
All right. Oh, one more.
Noah.
Thank you. Noah Levitz from William Blair. Tom and John, in the slide about repair and engineering with margin expansion, you noted greater than 200 basis points, largely driven by the paperless initiative. There's still 62% of the initiative-
Yeah
left. Was that greater than 200 basis points really the low-hanging fruit? Is there anything preventing you from getting that level of margin expansion, as you finish that, I think through 2027?
You had a few things going that contributed to that 200% expansion, not just paperless. It was a big contributor, but we had a lot of. You know, Tom mentioned the Kaizen events, et cetera, some other efficiency that we brought across the hangar. You know, some favorable contractual terms we were able to get from the customers. There were a number of things that helped with that. We would expect further margin expansion beyond that as we continue to roll out paperless. It was a portion of that 200, but it wasn't the whole thing.
Yeah. All right. If there are no further questions, I think it's time for a break. Thanks everyone for your attention this morning, and we'll be back in about 20-25 minutes.
Great. Take the chair with us, right?
If everyone could please take their seats, we'll go ahead and get started with the second half. To kick things off, we'll start with Andrew Schmidt, our SVP of Software. Thanks, Andy.
Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everybody. My name is Andrew Schmidt, and I run our software business. I've been with AAR for 11 years, and of those 11 years, 10 years have been spent with John taking the Trax owners out to dinner on a recurring basis. We've had fun. Seriously, of my 11 years with AAR, the majority of it has been spent taking technology and initially rolling it out at AAR to improve operations. John and I then figured out, boy, we might be able to commercialize some of this stuff. We began building digital services and eventually built up the portfolio of software companies that we have today. 35 years of experience in the industry. I worked with Oliver Wyman.
I was a partner there and co-led the Aviation and Aerospace Group. We did a considerable amount of work helping our clients understand technology and the benefits that it could bring to their operations. In some cases, we helped those airlines select technology, and then in many cases, where we helped them select the technology, implement it. Also spent time with Seabury Capital, where I co-led an investment fund that was started to focus on investments in aviation aftermarket software and travel tech more broadly. Three key messages that I'll deliver today. The first one is that we believe, hands down, we have the most comprehensive portfolio of software in the business today. It's focused on the aviation aftermarket, and specifically, we're looking at technical operations.
As John mentioned, with Trax at our core, we support all maintenance workflows, and then we capture data on our customers' behalf at each and every one of those maintenance workflows. We're focused on growth, and we'll go through the stats for both Aerostrat and Trax since we bought them. We're focused on bringing in new customers. Since we purchased the companies, we've brought in 24 new customers. For Trax, we've added about 2,500 aircraft to what we support. For Aerostrat, they brought on about 2,000 new tails since we bought them.
We're also very focused, and this is part of our investment thesis, was to expand and get to new customers that are on legacy systems, but then also to take our existing customers and upgrade them. A good portion of Trax's customers, we'll talk about this more specifically, they're still using Trax's legacy ERP system. We've got a big opportunity to upgrade all of those customers to the latest technology. Now, with Aerostrat and Airvoyant, we also have opportunities to cross-sell. The last key message here is that we will continue to use AAR's scale in connections with airlines around the world to accelerate the growth of all of our software businesses. John mentioned Delta, that would not have happened without the AAR acquisition. Just would not have happened.
Recently, Aerostrat won American Airlines. That may have happened without our support, where we're taking Aerostrat over into Europe and Asia, we'll make the introductions and help them win the work. It has been a big differentiator for us, has been a big accelerator for us. Most of the software companies, there's a few big ones out there that we compete with on a regular basis, but for the most part, they're small. Okay, diving into the portfolio. John has already introduced this. We've talked about it a lot, we have three software companies today. Trax is very much our flagship software company. They have the most customers. They operate in 35 countries, the most revenue. They have the most applications. It is our flagship product.
We'll go through the applications that they sell shortly here. The second product is Aerostrat. Aerostrat today focuses on long-range heavy maintenance check planning. Tom gets the output of Aerostrat, and there are a lot of other MROs that get it as well. The key thing, though, with Aerostrat is we want them to be the cornerstone of our MRO planning software. There is a big opportunity to help airlines plan better, get more utilization out of the assets that they have, reduce their maintenance cost, and ensure they have capacity to do the maintenance work that they need. Big growth opportunity for us in planning. We've talked about Airvoyant. This opportunity has been sitting out there for a long, long time.
I've been involved in the industry 35 years, and we've been talking about it for 35 years. With the confluence of a bunch of different things, AI being one of them, we believe we can transform the way that airlines and MROs buy parts. Now is the time for us to shine with Airvoyant. Last thing on this page. All of the products are integrated. All the products of all the companies are integrated. We invested heavily in integrating Trax and Aerostrat. Why did we do it? We did it because we can roll it out faster at Trax's customers. We can share data more completely. Airvoyant, same story. Very integrated with Trax.
If a customer says that they want to implement Airvoyant, we can take loads of historical purchasing data, send it over to Airvoyant, let the agents crunch away on it, get smarter about past decisions that have been made. They can understand why airlines made decisions to go with certain part suppliers in the past. The data that could be shipped to like an Aerostrat or to an Airvoyant, very rich. We know who they bought the part from. We know, you know, a lot of information about the supplier's performance. Did they deliver the part on time? Did it come across at the price that they promised? Focusing now on Trax, again, flagship software product. It has over 100 customers that operate in 35 countries.
We support 6,000 aircraft, which is about 20% of the commercial industry's aircraft. We see 20% of the industry's aircraft. The average tenure of the customer is 14 years. It's a very sticky product. Costs a lot of money to replace Trax. As long as we do a good job, we meet our customers' needs, help them meet their regulatory requirements, they're happy, they'll stick with us. Since we bought Trax, and this was March of 2023, so a little over 3 years ago, we've grown the top line by 90%. And another key metric that's not on the page here, is we've grown our annual recurring revenue by over 100%. Over 100%.
We spent a lot of time looking for ways to convert old revenue streams to SaaS recurring revenue streams. Key customers here, we've talked a lot about Delta, Cathay Pacific, Thai. These are all new wins since we bought the company. With Delta, we went live in a year. We went live in a year. We're live on their line. We support over 13,000 users, 1,000 aircraft, a bunch of turns every day. They're very happy with the product. They want us to accelerate the rollout. Our first phase with Delta is on the line. The second phase with Delta is in the hangars. Third phase is potentially in the component and engine shops. We're working through that with them now.
The final phase is in engineering when we replace their legacy ERP system. Trax, 3 products. We have eMRO that we sell today, eMRO, eMobility, and Trax Cloud. eMRO, as John mentioned, that's the MRO ERP system. This is the system, you could call it the regulatory system of record, but you can also call it the system of work execution. All workflows get managed through Trax, which means we're collecting data at every step of every process. An example of what might happen is our customers, they have a tech, comes in, turns on the iPad, tells him what work needs to be done. If parts need to be collected, he can go collect those parts. Tells him what aircraft he needs to go to, what hangar it's in.
Tells him that he needs to replace a part. The procedures to replace that part are there. The procedures to install the part, whether or not it needs to be inspected, they're all there. We are capturing data for our customers every step of the way. Where did that part come from? Who repaired it? What are they supposed to do with the part that just came off the airplane? Is it supposed to be routed to somebody for repair? All of that information is in the Trax system for our customers to use.
The second product is eMobility, and this is a suite of 14 mobile applications. Right around the time that Trax was building eMRO, talked with a number of customers who said they wanted mobile applications because it would enable them to be paperless. We built 3 applications in the first round, and then every year thereafter, we built a mobile application. Why mobile? Couple of reasons. One, super easy to use. Super easy to use, super intuitive. All of our mobile apps are role-based. If you're a technician, there's maybe 2 or 3 mobile apps that you use. If you're working in a warehouse, there's 1 application that you use. If you're a production planner, 3 applications that you use. If you work in quality, there's an application that you use.
Instead of logging into a big AAR ERP system and navigating around all of that, you come in, you have your iPad, you turn it on, and it tells you what to do. Again, 14 of those. We'll look to add to those as we go. The last product that we have is Trax Cloud. I mentioned that we grew our recurring revenue by over 100%. Our cloud revenue, our hosting revenue has gone up by 160%. This business is growing because our customers are pushing to offer the service. Customers wanna get out of data centers.
If they're using third parties to host their software, they find that we can host it better, we can do it more cost-effectively, which allows them to reduce their IT cost, and we can also provide a better service level when we host our software. Those are the 3 products. Key takeaways for Trax, we are the, as John mentioned, legal regulatory system of record. If you're using Trax, this is what you need to ensure that you're running a compliant operation. We enable 100% paperless digital workflows. Breeze, one of our first customers, 100% paperless. They don't use any paper in their technical operations. We can facilitate that, allows better information, and with the mobile apps, it's very much a two-way street.
We can give information to the user, and the user can send information back to the system. We capture data real-time, typically better information. We facilitate efficient workflows. Other big things that our customers get from the application, clearly efficiency across their operations and better asset utilization. Okay, second product. Aerostrat, as I mentioned, big growth vehicle for us, and we'll go through how they're gonna help us grow. But at their core is planning.
They've got a whole bunch of data scientists, a whole bunch of smart people that are figuring out how to build a forecast for an airline that says, "These are all the line checks that you need to do, and this is when you should do them." That's gonna optimize your workforce, and it's gonna optimize your maintenance program to make sure that you're getting the most out of the components that you have. A few ways to grow Aerostrat. One is today, they only offer 1 product. Their customers have been pushing them to develop a long-range planning product for components and engines. We're developing that now. We'll roll that out in FY 2027. With this product, we don't quite double the revenue at all their existing customers, but we increase it by about 80% or 90%.
Looking over at the stats, on the right, the bottom two-thirds of the revenue, is coming from non-Trax customers. If you look at Trax customers, only 10% of them are using Aerostrat today, and we have over 100 customers. With this integration that I talked about that we developed, we can implement Aerostrat at Trax customers in weeks instead of months. It's a matter of flipping a switch, and the way Aerostrat sells to its customers is through a trial program. Customers, Trax customers get to use it for a couple of months, see if they like it. If they like it, they start paying for it. Another big area where we expect to grow. The last area where we wanna grow Aerostrat is the stat here, bottom right, box.
Right now, the majority of their customers operate aircraft or their aircraft are based in the Americas. Their market share in the Americas is quite high. What we wanna do is bring them to Europe. We wanna bring them to Asia. We're talking with some of the largest airlines in Europe today. Hopefully we'll announce a win there soon. APAC, Trax was able to bring Aerostrat into that new business win there. When Thai bought Trax, they also bought Aerostrat. That was an addition that we made at the very end of the sales process. Great opportunity to cross-sell them. Since we purchased Aerostrat less than a year, their annual recurring revenue has grown by 60%. They pulled in American Airlines as a big customer, Thai, and they pulled in four other customers as well.
AirVoyant, our new product. I know some of you in the room actually got a demo of AirVoyant, but just quickly, what are we trying to do? The process today is very fragmented, very manual, systems are disconnected. The gray shaded boxes up here, this is where all the manual activity is occurring. You can see there's a whole bunch of Trax logos above all the other steps. If this customer that we're talking about here is using Trax is constantly looking to see what parts are needed to support the operation. They put that onto a requisition list. Today what happens is that requisition list gets put in a spreadsheet, printed out, and you got a whole bunch of buyers that are trying to source the parts that the airline doesn't have.
They're sending emails, they're making phone calls, they're getting onto websites, they're going to third-party marketplaces to try and find those parts. They then will get a quote for the part, and once they have a quote, they have to make a decision, which one are they gonna choose? Not a lot of science behind it unless they did something in an Excel spreadsheet. Those 3 activities are what we are trying to go after, and everybody has been trying to go after for years. Opportunity is huge. Airlines, MRO spend about $60 billion on parts and materials, and this is across the gamut every year. Trax's customers represent about and their suppliers. Trax's customers, the airline customers and their suppliers, represent 20% of that spend. Our system is capturing all that information.
Big opportunity, great place to start with Trax, sitting right at the core of our software business. Where is this going? Where is this going? All those three steps get boiled down to 1 screen and picking 1 pink button up there to click. 1 screen, 1 button to click. The parts go into the AirVoyant platform. John mentioned that we're working with Aeroxchange. They have access to over 5,000 suppliers. All that part requirement goes out to the 5,000 suppliers. They come back with quotes, and then our platform starts to crunch away and make recommendations. Up here, kind of hard to see, but on the bottom right, you'll see, we sent out a request for a part. We ended up getting 5 quotes back.
What our system will do, it's gonna rank order those quotes, and they're actually going to evaluate and score every response. That's the first thing we do. The second thing that we do is we deploy our agent. We built this on the AWS Bedrock platform using AgentCore. At this point, we're using an AWS LLM, but we can shift over to any large language model that we'd like to shift over to. That comes back with, "Buy this part. Buy this part." Then in plain English, could be any language for that matter, it says, "This is why we're recommending you buy that part." Then we come up with a confidence score. Our agent is 92% confident that this is the right supplier for you to go with.
This is the right place for you to buy that part. If you agree, you click that button. If you disagree, you click one of the buttons down on the bottom. If you click one of the buttons down on the bottom, you have to tell it why you didn't pick it. Why didn't you pick the recommendation? As John mentioned, though, where we want to go is we want to automate this. The confidence score can be used by the customer to say, "Eh, if you come back with 92% or above, just buy it for us. Let the agent buy it for us." That's what we're doing.
We're trying to take that very fragmented process, simplify it, put it all into Airvoyant, and come back with 1 screen that you can click, or eventually, you let the system buy it on your behalf. All right. What did we hear? We launched on April 21st. Very positive feedback. As John mentioned, everybody validated the issue. Everybody validated the opportunity for improvement. We demoed before we launched to many customers, but we also demoed at the show. Everybody loved the user experience. It's totally different. It's designed to manage an agentic workforce, right? It's no longer do you have to look at a whole bunch of information and make a decision. It comes back with a recommendation. What the application is all about is managing the agentic workforce.
Do you want to let them do something or do you want to keep monitoring their performance? Once you let them do stuff, you want to be able to monitor their performance. That's the way the application it is designed. The other big piece of feedback that we have is just the acceptance by everybody that we talk to, that an agentic workforce is something they've been thinking about, and they would support. This is what we have to build out quickly. On the right side of the page up here is we're not just going to build one agent, but we want to build, again, a workforce of agents. The first one is helping make decisions about what part to select. We'll build an agent to order it. We'll also build a demand agent, and this is big.
This is big. Look at the supply chain. Are there shortage of parts? If you know you need a part, we have Aerostrat, it knows what you need 5 years out. If you know next year you're going to need a part and the supply chain is all clogged up, buy it now. That's where we want to go with the demand agent, and then there's some other agents that we have on here. I'm running out of time, we'll go through this quickly. It's exciting stuff to talk about. Our growth, 2 axes. 2 axes. We want to go after customers, as John mentioned, that are still using legacy systems to support their fleets. Big opportunity for us there. We've been going at it. A lot of our wins, Delta's a great example. They are on a legacy ERP. They've chosen us.
We've got a long-term process to replace that legacy ERP. We wanna go after that. The other big opportunity for us is even for the customers that are off those legacy platforms, we believe, and it's our goal to have the best software in the business, use us. Use us. Delta has over 160 software applications that they use to support their technical operations. They wanna skinny that down. They'd like us to be one of the partners that provides the same functionality that they get out of that 160 applications with eMRO, eMobility, Airvoyant, and AeroStrat. That's where we believe the industry is going, so a big growth opportunity for us. Our growth strategy looks a little bit different than everybody else's here, but we basically have three pillars. One, bring on new customers.
Bring on new customers. Second part is to land and expand at existing customers. We've increased the size of our sales team. They're very consultative. You have to be consultative to help customers make a decision on whether or not they want to go with your software. And then we want to sell more stuff. We have to build more applications that our customers like, our customers love, so that's what we're doing through partnerships, organic efforts like Airvoyant, and acquisitions like Aerostrat. These are some examples of customers that we won. Delta, biggie, we've talked a lot about them, but in the APAC region, significant expansion over the last 3 years. Brought in Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Thai. There's more for us to go after in the APAC region. American Airlines, a big win for Aerostrat.
They now support three of the four majors in the U.S. Hopefully the other one will come shortly. Again, we're looking over in Europe, and we're looking at APAC to expand them. Expanding at existing customers, these are some examples where we increased our annual recurring revenue four to five times. Four to five times by getting them onto Trax's new products. Lastly, we'll just continue to look for organic opportunities to build new software. We'll also look for opportunities to acquire additional companies that fit well with us and are very strategic in nature. In summary, we have a very complete and compelling portfolio of software to offer our customers. We're very focused on growth. Lastly, we are looking to expand wherever we can, and we're looking to continue to leverage AAR scale and capabilities to do that. Thanks. Up next is Mr. Nick.
Mic drop. There. All right. Thank you, Andy. I promise I will not use the word agentic in my in my overview. No, thanks again. Welcome. Good morning. I am Nicholas Gross. I'm Senior Vice President for our Government Solutions business. I've had the pleasure to be at AAR for the last 10 years, mostly in the government space, and spent the last 30 years basically in the government market between my military and industry timeframe. You've heard a lot this morning about this incredible platform that we built at AAR and how our solutions help deliver value and create better results for our customers, our employees, and our shareholders.
I get the just great benefit here to talk a little bit about the government solution story, how we go to market, why it's differentiated, why it's durable, and then also why it's a just an important growth piece of the overall AAR portfolio. Really, it's one that brings together everything you heard about from my colleagues here. All the capabilities you heard about from Tom, from Frank, from Andy, everything that we do more broadly across the commercial side, we do the same thing for the government side as well. At a high level, you'll see a business that is scaling, expanding in margins, and aligning closely with structural defense and structural trends and offense around commercial companies and commercial capabilities, improved readiness, and total lifecycle cost.
At its core, really, what we try to do is bring those commercial best practices into mission-critical government operations, all about improving performance, accelerating readiness, and again, lowering total lifecycle costs. I think those three themes are really something that's going to underpin a lot of what I'm talking about today. In addition to those three themes, there are three key messages that I wanted to highlight. First, this is a scaled and growing segment, about $500 million today, with a very substantial pipeline of opportunity of approximately $48 billion. That opportunity, again, is supported by long-term structural tailwinds, including increased defense funding, procurement reform, and this really push toward overall commercial solutions. Second, we are differentiated in how we approach the market.
You know, AAR brings commercial best practices, I know we talk about a lot, but speed, efficiency, cost discipline into government environments, and frankly, that's why we win in the government space. Those requirements and capabilities are becoming increasingly more and more valuable to our global customers as they look to find ways to increase the readiness of their fleets, but at the same time, and those costs for readiness are going up, managing their overall budgets. Third, our growth strategy is focused and disciplined and really focused on profitability. We have purposely targeted areas where AAR or the AAR portfolio has a clear advantage. Drive towards commercial solutions, higher value modification work, growing our foreign military sales, and then finally, software integration through Trax.
The final piece I do want to mention is for the government business, it's not only a growth story, it's also a margin expansion and return profile story as well. Let me just put some metrics behind that real quick. As I mentioned before, the government solutions business is roughly $0.5 billion and has grown by low double-digits over the last year. More importantly, though, our earnings are growing significantly faster. Our LTM EBITDA, $56 million, is up 50% year-over-year, which has translated to margins of 11%, which is up 300 basis points over that same time. What that means is we're scaling efficiency, and we're more profitable as we replace some of our legacy work with more profitable new work.
Our role or basically key offerings, and our embedded positions in some of the most critical platforms in use today, that's key tactical, tanker and mobility fleets, is really what gives us a competitive advantage. Our ability to support both U.S. and allied customers through our global footprint also brings us a competitive advantage. Our role, what we do really spans, again, everything you heard of today. Maintenance, supply chain, logistics, even some case flight operations. On the supply chain side, everything from 3PL warehousing to add demand planning, demand forecasting, point of use availability, performance-based logistics. Maintenance, everything from O, I, and D-level maintenance. Think flight line to depot, everything in between. Pilot training, flight operations, flying aircraft for government, everything in between.
A lot of what we do is organically, but a lot of what we do relies on other parts of the business as well. Our touch points into the broader AAR is actually really significant. Really this combination of platform relevance and expanding margin is what underpins the quality of ordering profiles that we have. I do want to highlight, you know, we are not a niche service provider. We really are an increasingly integrated mission-critical partner in sustaining global fleets. I'd like to talk a little bit about what makes us different. Really, our differentiation is how we operate. At the end of the day, we apply commercial, again, commercial operating principles, speed, efficiency, and cost discipline into environments where traditional defense companies have struggled to produce these outcomes in that market.
We operate on more than 30 platforms across more than 35 different countries, which not only gives us scale, but also gives us geographic pre-presence to many of our global customers. At the end of the day, our real benefit and our real advantage is that we can deliver. We deliver faster turnaround times. We deliver lower cost structures and efficient cost structures. We deliver tailored, customized solutions that help our customers meet their end requirement to increase the overall fleet availability. In short, we're able to simplify complex global operations by doing what AAR does best. Also critically, we're able to leverage the entire AAR platform, meaning we bring together multiple aspects of the value chain rather than be a point-of-solution, singular provider.
In many cases, because of our ability to wrap in the larger part of AAR, we're able to solve problems, frankly, that our government customers have struggled with for years over traditional structures. I think this, again, allows us to win work and expand our share. If you've heard John speak before, you hear him say a lot that no one in the industry does what AAR does in the way that we do it, and that's especially true in the government space. No one can wrap together all the pieces of the aviation market like we can and bring them together in a customized, tailored solution to solve our government customer challenges. Again, that's allowing us to win work.
All this kind of directly feeds into the size and durability of the opportunity ahead. You know, from you see the number on the page, $48 billion, that opportunity is pretty significant. The pipeline for us is divided into time horizons. $12 billion in the near term, $16 billion in the midterm, defined by 1 to 3 years and 3 to 5 years. I do want to highlight that when we look at this $48 billion, these are opportunities that fit within AAR's current capability set. This isn't just like the broad duty or broad aviation modification or fleet sustainment budgets. These are specific opportunities that fit directly within our capability set. I also want to highlight, too, that the underlying drivers behind this pipeline are structural and durable.
What I mean by that, really four kind of key things. One, an increasing and sustained focus on readiness and total lifecycle cost. If you follow the President's budget, that obviously was a key theme of some of the increase in defense spending is how do we not only buy new, but how are we making sure that we keep the fleets that we have in service longer? Two, policy-driven commercialization of the defense industrial base. Another key theme I'd say of this administration specifically is how do we think and act more commercially? If you've heard any of us at AAR talk in the government space before, and we've been saying that for a decade, how do we get the commercial, or how do we get the military industry, Department of Defense, especially on aviation, to think and act more like Delta?
Regardless of administrations, I do believe that some of the things that they're doing with procurement reform and FAR reform and those sort of things will hold regardless of who the next administration is. Third, a rise in global defense spending. You've heard Christopher Jessup mention a little bit about defense spending in INDOPACOM and Europe. I remember not too long ago, we were talking about 2% basically for NATO, right? 2% defense budgets for NATO and our European allies. Now they're talking 5%, which I think would have been unheard of back in the day, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Finally, the extension of existing fleet lifecycles. A lot's talked about on the commercial side about how long aircraft are flying and new aircraft deliveries.
I mean, that's been status quo in the government for decades. I mean, they fly very old aircraft, they've always flown very old aircraft, and they continually have to find ways to make sure that supply chain can keep those aircraft flying longer and longer. For us, when we look at these are not short-cycle dynamics. These are long-term shifts, what we believe in how the government procures and sustain their fleets. With, you know, with expanding needs in global defense, you know, never-ending budget pressures, I mean, we honestly see the opportunity for this to continue long into the future. I think those elements are really what give us confidence that this is really a durable growth strategy for a company like AAR to apply a commercial best practices approach and not just a temporary upswing.
In addition to the growth aspect of it, I do wanna just quickly highlight the value that the government business brings to the overall portfolio. You know, our government solution business really is a key component of AAR's balanced portfolio. It drives incremental work across other parts of AAR and requires very limited to no capital investment, which obviously is a great value creation story. If we think about that, before this meeting, I actually got asked the question is: How does the interconnectedness work between the government and other parts of the business? I'd say probably 50% of our work in the government touches another part of AAR.
Whether that's Tom, who does the heavy maintenance on the P-8s and C-40s and others, or Frank, who's supplying parts into some of our long-term supply chain contracts, or a component repair facility who's working on the aircraft that we support, all of this is so interconnected, and at the end of the day, it is a growth driver for other parts of the business. It also provides a stable revenue stream. Government customers obviously provide consistent demand and reliable payment, which helps mitigate cyclicality in the other parts of the business. If we think about cyclicality, obviously, during market downturns, it provides resilience. Obviously, the most recent example of COVID, which is an extreme example of it, but it's a great example of obviously that resilience.
I believe our commercial business was down 90% during that timeframe, where our government business remained strong and steady. Finally, because of the size and scale of AAR, we're able to leverage our infrastructure efficiently in the sense that we can bring on and take on new work with, again, relatively little investment. All this translates into what we would consider a high-quality revenue stream that contributes growth, profitability, and stability. Let me just quickly connect to how we're executing that strategically now. As I mentioned before, our focus for strategy is really trying to scale where we have clear competitive advantage.
First, we're expanding our commercial services for the military offerings, and that's trying to increase the adoption of commercial parts, repair, and software. That's really been the story of AAR for the last decade since I've been here. If you think of over that time, we have successfully secured and got them to allow USM and broader commercial services on just about every single commercially derivative fleet or aircraft that's out there today, including new aircraft such as the KC-46 and P-8, which was really unheard of just 10 years ago. Additionally to that, if you look at the commercially derivative sustainment contracts, we own, i.e. we're the prime, or we support most of those that are currently fielded today. Now, there are a few basically that we're not on, but we are laser-focused.
Basically, we believe we're the market leader in that market. We're laser-focused on bringing those back on board, but we do touch or support almost all of them that are out there. Second, you know, when we think about, sorry, excuse me, moving into higher value work, the classified mod work is something that's new. Actually, this is, I think about the last time we had this presentation that was not on here. As we really kinda refocus the business and how do we reshape who we are and find ways where our operating ethos, our mentality brings a clear advantage, this is one area that came about that is a new area for us. That's expansion of our classified mod work and a further push into kind of key non-commercially derivative fleets.
We'll talk a little bit about F-16s, in an upcoming slide, but, you know, we've really targeted fleets that not only are broadly in service across the U.S., but more broadly in service globally. Think F-16, C-130, UH-60, those sort of aircraft. F-16 specifically, over the course of the last two years, you know, we've built probably one of the largest global avionics contract field teams workforce in the world. Again, something we're very proud of. Third, we're growing our foreign military sales business, and that's really by leveraging our existing relationships and commercial infrastructure that we have.
I mentioned the defense budgets in Europe, and I think that's important because we see great opportunity not only to sell directly to these foreign governments, but also, if you think of the European defense industrial base specifically, they've expressed concern about their ability to ramp up to meet these long-term support trends as well. We see an opportunity not only to sell to the governments, but also support their local industrial base, which I think is important because, you know, there is an inward push basically in Europe right now to try to keep things intercontinent, so to speak. You know, we can be a value add to them to help them scale and help them support those actions long term.
Finally, we're integrating Trax, and this is probably one of the ones I'm most excited about. You know, obviously, Trax provides not only efficiency, data visibility, but also stickiness with some of these customers long term, and that's including not only implementing Trax on our internal contracts where we support government customers, but also direct. You know, Trax currently supports the KC-46 and VC-25 fleets, we see a tremendous amount of opportunity for a further adoption of that software platform across the Department of Defense. This is a need, whether it be Air Force, Navy, whoever it is, they have a dramatic, drastic need for a new and enhanced kinda eMRO software solution, this is exactly what they're looking for, a commercial off-the-shelf solution in use by some of the major best airlines in the world today, constantly updated, security parameters in place that allow them to secure their data.
Again, we're pretty excited about that and see just a great opportunity there. All this is really anchored in disciplined execution, focused on the win rates, retention, scaling selectively. I did want to just briefly talk about this case study real quick, and to me, this kind of highlights our execution. We talk a lot about our commercial offerings and our commercially derivative offerings, but this really highlights our execution in kind of complex mission-critical programs and how our commercial operating ethos or mindset transforms into more military-specific fleets. Just to set the stage here a little bit, the Air Force was facing significant cost overruns and schedule delays across their F-16 modification program. There's a variety of different mods that they do.
I mean, if you know these aircraft, basically it's just one mod after another, year after year, where they're just constantly upgrading those aircraft. As part of our, we had awarded a 10-year, $365 million IDIQ for F-16 maintenance. They basically had to stand up one site. They needed some help to help us stand up one site. We very quickly established the trust and confidence in that, one, we're able to deliver quality aircraft, but two, we're able to do it much more efficiently and rapidly than they've seen in the past. In less than two years, that has grown to over 200 mechanics worldwide at 12 global sites. I think the results have been fantastic. We've delivered over 240 aircraft for modification. We have accelerated that fleet modification timeline by years.
I think most importantly, we've improved the delivery of advanced warfighter capabilities that are currently being used in action today, and we've earned the trust and confidence of our Air Force partners to look to give us more work on the F-16 as well as ancillary fleets. Just in closing, I just wanna highlight these key points again. First, we have a scaled business with a large and durable pipeline that is backed by structural defense trends. Second, we're differentiated. We bring commercially speed, efficiency, and integration into government end markets. Finally, we're executing a disciplined strategy focused on profitable margin accretive growth. If you take all that together, our government solutions business is a high-confidence growth platform that enhances both the performance and the resilience of AAR. I'll like to turn over now to Dylan Wolin, our Chief Financial Officer.
Thanks, Nick. I'm Dylan Wolin, Chief Financial Officer. By way of background, I have 7 years with AAR, 19 years in aerospace, and 24 years of finance experience overall. That includes 4 years actually covering investor relations at AAR. As many of you know, I actually left AAR about 20 months ago. I had a very unique opportunity to go to an operational role outside of the industry. While I was gone, I sort of was able to observe from afar, this team really kind of accelerate its pace of execution, and it was exciting to see. When the opportunity came up to come back in this role, I was excited to rejoin the team and really be part of the momentum that we are continuing to drive here.
With that, I will start with a few key points. First, over the last several years, we have delivered consistent and exceptional financial results. That's across sales, margin expansion, and adjusted EPS growth. Second, we've done that while demonstrating balance sheet flexibility and strength, and we're very well positioned to continue to fund our growth. Third, we've been using M&A successfully as a tool to support execution of our strategy and to add to shareholder value creation, and we expect to continue to do so. Finally, as I just said, we have been executing at an accelerated rate, and we plan to continue to do that to drive further growth and margin expansion and deliver additional cash conversion. I wanna take a minute to summarize further the actions we've taken over the past several years.
We've added differentiated capability through acquisitions in each of parts, repair, and software that have bolstered our integrated business model and improved our financial performance. We've simplified and strengthened the portfolio by exiting or restructuring operations that were underperforming or did not fit our model. That's airlift, composites, landing gear, and most recently, commercial programs. Finally, we've extended our leadership position organically by strengthening our core activities, particularly in distribution and airframe MRO, where we have continued to innovate our offerings and drive efficiency. Resulted, as I said, in exceptional financial performance. Since FY 2022, we have grown sales at a 15% CAGR. We've grown adjusted EBITDA at a 26% CAGR. We've expanded adjusted EBITDA margin by 350 basis points, and we have grown adjusted EPS at a 19% CAGR.
We've been doing what we said we would do, and it has translated into results. We've done that while keeping our balance sheet strong. We ended Q3 with less than 2.2 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA. We have over $800 million of liquidity and no near-term maturities. Our leverage is within our target range of 2 to 2.5 times. Turning to cash, improving our conversion from adjusted EBITDA to cash from operations is a key priority. We've already set ourselves up to be more cash generative through our portfolio actions. As we grow our more cash generative activities and importantly, drive higher inventory turns in certain of our businesses and lower AR days, we expect to drive further cash conversion.
We're targeting run rate operating cash as a percentage of EBITDA by 30% plus by 2029 and expect to ramp to that level over the 3-year window. Our capital allocation priorities have not changed. First, we're gonna continue to invest in organic growth. That means supporting new distribution wins, additional repair capability, and if warranted capacity, PMA or proprietary parts development, and building out our software platform. Second, as I mentioned, we'll continue to use M&A as a tool to accelerate execution of our strategy. We'll continue to be disciplined, both strategically and financially as we do it, and I'll touch on that further in a few minutes.
Third, we'll continue to prioritize a strong balance sheet with a target leverage ratio of 2 to 2.5 times, as I mentioned, with willingness to go higher temporarily to support M&A and then rapidly delever, which we have demonstrated the ability to do. Finally, we will look to return capital to shareholders through share repurchase opportunistically. I wanna spend a moment on where we are in terms of being able to create value through M&A. We've done 6 acquisitions over the last 3 years. They've added margin, growth, and scale. Importantly, they've accelerated the build-out of our parts repair and software platform, and all are on track to generate returns in excess of the cost of capital.
At the same time, we've developed a reputation as an acquirer that can be trusted to execute in a fair way. As a result, we've become a buyer of choice in the market, which positions us favorably to continue to use M&A as a tool to drive execution and shareholder value creation. Importantly, we've also exited a number of businesses over the last few years that were either not core or not meeting our return thresholds. The result is a simplified, enhanced, and higher-performing portfolio today. In terms of our M&A approach going forward, we will continue to be disciplined, as I mentioned. We'll focus on the 3 key legs of our platform. In parts, that'll be distribution, which could be new end markets or new product lines. In repair, that could be capability, capacity, or improved cost position.
In software, we'll look to continue to expand our offering. Strategically, anything that we do has to accelerate execution against our overall strategic objectives. We wanna add differentiated capabilities or offerings that complement what we have. Accordingly, there have to be clear synergy opportunities. Financially, we will target accretion to both growth and margin. Of course, any acquisition must have expected returns in excess of the cost of capital. Finally, we'll prioritize targets with strong cash flow profiles. Turning to the financial framework that John introduced earlier in the presentation. With respect to sales, we are targeting a CAGR of 6%-10% over the 3-year window off of a full year FY 2026 base. Excluding commercial programs, which we'll be winding down over this timeframe, we are targeting an 8%-12% CAGR.
In both cases, we'd expect growth next year to be around the top end of those ranges as we get a full year of the FY 2026 acquisitions. We are targeting adjusted EBITDA margin by FY 2029 of 13+%, and excluding commercial programs, 13%-14%+. We're targeting adjusted EPS CAGR of 15%, and as I mentioned earlier, we're targeting operating cash as a percentage of EBITDA of 30%+. Note that over short measurement periods, that metric will vary, particularly as we make strategic growth investments in inventory. This framework does not reflect any additional M&A, which would be upside opportunity. Regarding the drivers of our growth, they'll come from each of our parts supply, repair engineering and software, and government businesses.
Our commercial growth is supported by extremely resilient demand for air travel and an aircraft fleet age that is expected to remain elevated well beyond the forecast period, which supports continued demand for parts and repair. We expect to continue to get above-market growth and distribution as that offering continues to resonate with OEMs, as Frank described. We expect continued penetration by our software offerings. As airframe MRO efficiency continues to increase, that creates growth capacity. We have capacity today to do more component MRO volumes. Finally, our government businesses are well supported by the administration's prioritization of operational readiness, as Nick described. In terms of potential headwinds, I'll note this does not assume any meaningful impact from elevated fuel prices, although so far that is not something our customers are seeing or expecting or seeking to pass to us. Finally, turning to our margin expansion walk.
First, mix shift. That means mix shift towards higher margin parts, software, and component repair work, as well as improved mix within government solutions, as Nick described, which we're already starting to see. Second, more efficiency in the hangars, as Tom described. That includes completing our work at Greensboro, closing Indianapolis, and rolling paperless out to the rest of our facilities. Finally, we expect to continue to leverage our fixed cost base through scale and growth. Based on those growth drivers, excluding commercial programs, which we expect to still be in the process of winding down in FY 2029, we are targeting 13%-14% plus adjusted EBITDA margin. With that, we will turn to another round of Q&A.
Thank you, Dylan. As they get the chairs set up here, just a friendly reminder to please state your name before you ask a question.
Oops.
Good recovery.
that would've been bad.
Yeah, that would've been bad.
I'd like to point out that Dylan and I completely coordinated our outfits today for everybody. Shows you how aligned we are as a team.
All right, who wants to go first?
I'll just go. Dylan, could you touch on kind of the CapEx and sales or total CapEx ratio? Sorry. Ryan Burnett here with Price. You said 30% operating cash flow more a gainst EBITDA, but you touched a bit on the implied CapEx to sales or total CapEx dollar that you kind of expect over that period and the shape of it.
Sure. CapEx is not part of that, the guidance is related to cash from operations. We've historically not been a particularly intensive CapEx business. We've run kind of between 1 and sometimes up to 1.5% of sales. I expect that to continue generally going forward. We don't have particular CapEx requirements. As mentioned, the efficiency in the hangars actually create additional capacity there. We have additional capacity in the component repair shops, I would expect to continue to run at that level.
Josh Pinner with Weatherly Capital. Could you talk a little bit more about Trax? Andy, you were talking about, and we heard on the government side that there might be an opportunity there. What are the discussions that have happened with Trax so far with the Department of Defense and other parts of the government, and then what are they using today? We talked about these ancient systems. I imagine the government may be more ancient still. Just talk about what are they using today, what discussions have happened, and what would you need to do to Trax to kind of make it meet government demands? Thank you.
Sure. I don't know if necessarily want to get into too much of the discussions that happened today, but I'll talk about the Air Force first. You know, the Air Force has been on a 10-year implementation of a software system that I don't think has ever fully been implemented. I think they've had 2 iterations now of basically trying to implement something that hasn't worked, hasn't necessarily worked out. I will say that the Air Force and specifically Department of Defense, as they look to the commercial industry, one of the companies that they revere and look up to is Delta, right?
They say, "How can we treat our aviation assets and look and act more like Delta?" When we announced the Delta win through that Trax recently had, they actually reached out to us to talk about the Trax platform. I guess I will leave it there for right now, but we just do think there's great opportunity because they have a need for it, and we have a great product.
Okay.
Hi. Kyle Wenclawiak, Jefferies. Within the sort of 100 basis points of margin expansion that you have planned in there over the forecast period, it seems like the largest lift is probably in heavy MRO as well as software. When you think of sort of the composite of what is contributing to the margin expansion, can you sort of bucket that between the segments and where you think the greatest areas of opportunity are?
Yeah, I think, as you said, it actually comes in all of the segments. You know, with parts will probably have the greatest opportunity for growth driven by distribution. That's among our highest margin activities. Airframe efficiency, as I said, in repair, as well as growth of the component work. And in government solutions, although we've already seen some of this, we haven't fully seen the mix shift that Nick described. It'll come from all of the segments.
Let's go to Sheila.
Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies, I'm gonna follow up on Kyle's question. Can you just specifically on the airframe MRO, can you talk about the heavy maintenance? I know that maybe it has more labor hours than the component, how do you think about low double digits ever getting to high teens, and what's the runway for a component MRO?
Want to do that?
make sure I understand the question. Are you asking about the potential for margin expansion?
For airframe
at airframe?
For the airframe on the heavy checks, where can those low double-digit margins go?
Yeah, so low double-
on component
low, low teens margin. Can we get them to mid-teens margin in the airframe business? We believe so. That is continued rollout of our paperless system that's leveraging the expansion over the fixed cost base, completing the integration of HAECO, and making sure that we're attracting the right work. In other words, not all heavy maintenance visits are created equal. We wanna make sure that we are getting those that allow us the greatest opportunity from a margin perspective, and that is an ongoing dialogue with the customer. Our customers use multiple providers. They send out lots of different work to each of those providers, and we wanna make sure that the best work is coming to coming to us, and we earn that through performance.
If we're turning aircraft faster than everybody else at the highest level of qualities, we're gonna get rewarded with better mix shift. All of those things, you know, And Sheila, you and I have talked about this. You know, heavy maintenance has come a long way, particularly for us. I mean, this is a critical service. You know, the engine guys in their overhaul shop, they get a lot of attention. Airframe heavy maintenance is a critical service, and we are a critical partner to the airlines. As we've seen only recently, we've seen that they will pay more for performance. We're counting on, you know, getting some price over time as well.
Short answer to your question is, yeah, we see opportunity ultimately to get that business to the mid-teens. On components, similarly, we are operating, you know, if you look at our shops right now, we're at about one and a quarter, one and a half shifts per shop. We've got, you know, capacity to essentially double throughput through our, you know, of our fixed cost base, and that's a higher margin, gross margin activity than heavy maintenance. As we increase throughput, we could see high teens, margins getting into low 20s.
Let's go to Ken.
Ken, you've been waiting.
Well, let me. Hi. Kenneth Herbert with RBC. I'll ask the high-level growth question, but I'd be really interested, particularly in the parts supply business and sort of the underlying assumptions for distribution relative to USM in terms of growth and how to think about that. Because I think the high-level number implies clearly some normalization of what's been probably one of your fastest-growing businesses over the last few years as we think about that over the next few years. How should we think about parts supply in particular and the pieces within that?
Yeah. The growth is coming from distribution. USM is a business we're very happy with it. As I mentioned, there's a lot of ties with USM to the other businesses. It keeps us really in touch with the markets. But in terms of growth, we could expect very modest growth in USM. What you would get out of USM over time is margin expansion. Margins in USM are about half of what they normally would be, and that's because material is so tight and it costs so much to acquire material that you're that you eventually sell.
We would expect margin improvement in USM, not necessarily a lot of growth. Then your point on, you know, growth from distribution, it is true. I mean, we've been putting up some very impressive numbers, we believe 25%-30% organic growth. It's north of a $1 billion-dollar business now, so you start to lap some tougher comps. We would absolutely expect our distribution business to continue to grow at meaningfully above market rates.
Just real quick within that, what's the underlying assumption for, like, sort of new distribution contracts relative to sort of same-store sales, so to speak?
Yeah. At this point, I would say, and I think it's consistent with the last couple of quarters, we're about half same-store sales, you know, call it 40% from the ramp-up of new contracts, and then the balance is price.
Michael Leshock, KeyBank.
Hi.
You talked about the divestitures and winding down this commercial business. Do you see more room to go on that front? If so, is there incremental, you know, is that incorporated in your guidance at all for the long-term targets?
I would say from the portfolio, we are always evaluating the portfolio. You know, 15 years ago, commercial programs was a growth area for us. That market moved away, you know, the returns no longer met our thresholds. This was an action we decided to take, as you can see in the numbers, it's gonna be accretive in all respects. In terms of the remaining portfolio, at this point, we feel like we're in a pretty good spot. Again, we're always evaluating things, we've dealt with the significant, you know, areas of the portfolio that are a drag on our returns. I'll answer this just because I know it's on everybody's mind. The mobility systems business, the manufacturing business that we have, that's a good business. It's good cash flow. It's good margins.
It doesn't require a lot of management time. To remind everybody, that's a legacy manufacturing business where we manufacture shelters, pallets, and containers. It's 100%, U.S. They perform well for the government, and as you've seen from recent press releases, they're getting a lot of orders right now as a result of what's going on. Even though it doesn't fit neatly on the page, it's a good business to be in, and it's not dilutive to in any way as the businesses were that we've gotten out of.
Let's go to Scott next.
Scott Mikus from Melius Research. John, Dylan, quick question. What is the revenue right now for Aircraft Reconfig? What's the EBITDA margins? What is the growth outlook and margin expansion there over the 3-year targets? How should we be thinking about the cadence of expanding the PMA catalog there?
Yeah, I don't think we haven't disclosed Aircraft Reconfig, you know, financial specifically, so I probably won't get into that. I think you can think about it broadly as both a higher margin and higher growth, you know, business than much of the rest of the portfolio. Don't know if you want to talk about expansion on proprietary elements.
Growth opportunities. We bought the business with a very healthy backlog and a built-in ramp to revenue that's meaningful. Again, it's small relative to the total, but as a percentage, it actually is expected to ramp really nicely over the next couple of years based on work they've already done. Similar to our other businesses, we made the acquisition because we believe we can open doors for them. And we believe that their technology, their capabilities are, you know, significant, and we believe we can introduce them to other customers around the world. And as Dylan pointed out, this is good high-margin work. Going back to your point on PMA opportunity, I mean, we sell parts. We have an incredible commercial front end and defense front end to put parts out.
We like keeping PMA in the portfolio because they're very, very high margin. The ART acquisition will accelerate our ability to develop more PMAs. Even so, it will remain a small part of the revenue for some time as we ramp.
Any further questions?
Yeah.
Hi, I'm Matthew Ace. I'm with G2 Investment Partners. You've been pretty clear about having a line of sight for Trax going from $50 million in revenue to $100 million. With all we've learned about software today with Airvoyant, how should we think about the software growth algorithm once you hit the $100 million fee?
Yeah, I mean, we, I think I've said publicly that we've doubled it since we've had it from 25 to 50. You just said we've got a clear path to go from 50 to 100. Based on what we see, we see a path to go from 100 to 200. The 50 to 100 is, you know, that's kind of already captured. That's upgrading existing customers to eMRO. It's ramping the implementations that we've already won. That gets you there. We didn't talk about the business model, specific business model for Airvoyant. Our goal right now is to get it out there and get users, thousands of users at airlines around the world, using this platform and transacting this platform.
We want this to be the standard by which airlines are making purchase decisions and buying parts. Ultimately, we see this as a, I hate the term, but it's accurate, a marketplace model where you've got subscription fees by buyers and transaction fees by sellers. You know, we certainly, we've got our own internal models of what that could be, but it's very, very early days. As you heard from Andy, we're extremely encouraged by the response that we got, both in terms of saying, "Yes, that is a problem that needs to be solved." Then the next question was, "Okay, great, but can it also do this? Can it also do this?
Can it also do this? Then the second thing, and we weren't sure how this was going to go over, was, and I don't think it would've been this way a year ago. I think we came out with this at just the right time. Airlines looking at this going, "I'm willing to turnkey purchasing decisions over to an agentic purchasing agent. I'm willing to do that." I don't think we were there a year ago. The conversations we've had with airlines, it's kind of like, "Yeah, all right. Let's try this out." That's encouraging. Just to go back to your question, all of those, all of those things, those new offerings, the scaling of Aerostrat would contribute to go from 100 to 200.
Okay.
Yeah, John, just to follow up on the software offering. You know, the whole story when you bought Trax was it had under-invested for several years. You put a lot of money into Trax. You really upgraded the offering, and since then you've seen sort of a real acceleration in market adoption.
Yep.
Where are you today with the broader software package in terms of the competitive position? Are there more sort of significant upgrades you need to make, or should this really be a real sort of accelerator from a margin standpoint as you go from $50 to $100 from a revenue side?
Yeah. We believe that we have the best offering in the market. Since we have made these investments, since we made the acquisition and made the subsequent investments, our win rate has been materially higher. It's hard to explain the significance of the Delta win. I mean, that opened so many doors for us. The cool thing is Delta has been a willing advocate out there for us in the market. You know, we were concerned that some of our existing customers, when we won Delta, were gonna be like, "Oh, wow. I'm worried that Trax resources are now gonna be diverted towards Delta as opposed to me, an existing customer." It's actually the opposite because those customers know that we are building new, additional functionality for Delta that they will ultimately benefit from.
You know, the profile of Trax and the fact that we're spending I mean, think about this. I mean, three years ago, we had this meeting here. We had just bought the company. I don't believe any notes that came after our Analyst Day, you know, mentioned Trax, and now it's the forefront, or a key point. We're excited about the market adoption. You know, in terms of building the program out, there are still investments that we need to make.
Obviously, AirVoyant is just launched, and we got a ton of feedback over the last couple weeks of, "Okay, this is awesome, but what else can it do?" That's gonna require more investment. Similarly, as we enter into the remaining stages of Delta implementation, we'll be investing in Delta and capability for Delta, but then we can then sell it to other customers. you know, a lot of work has been done, but this is a situation where the more we get into it, the more opportunity that we see.
Question. Any further questions? All right. Maybe with that, we'll take it back to you, John, for concluding comments.
Sure. I would just say that, you know, very, you know, very happy that everybody joined us here today. It's great to be back in New York and kind of tell the full story. I know we've had lots of meetings with many of you over the last several months, you know, talking about the parts repair and software strategy. It was great to be together and bring it home all in one place and talk about the way our businesses work together. Hopefully, it's coming through that the changes that we've made to the company are structural and durable and will continue to drive improved growth and improved margins. We're very happy that you were here and appreciate the interest and support. Thanks.