I am Peter Gundermann. I'm president of Astronics. I am not Nancy Hedges. Nancy Hedges is our controller, and between weather in Buffalo and weather here in New York City, she did not make the trip. So I'm here unaccompanied and undefended, so keep your questions high level and easy. I've got 40 minutes, I think, and about 30 slides, so we're gonna move through this pretty quickly. I have two main objectives to talk about. One is where we have been as a company during the pandemic. We're an aerospace supplier. The pandemic was not kind to aerospace companies, and we've been on quite a journey, so I wanna kinda hit that first. The "so what" there is, if you like aerospace, and you believe in the recovery, I think we're a good way to play it.
We've got a lot of tailwinds and a lot of fundamentals that are very positive for our business short term, and also long term. We'll talk about that to some extent, and then, of course, we'll do a quick summary of what we do as a company. We've got three or four major thrusts as a business. We'll talk through those quickly and then do a quick financial summary at the end. And I guess, it's a small enough crowd. I don't mind, doing questions along the way if something sparks your, interest or fancy. Go ahead and raise your hand. We can do it that way. So, buyer beware, small cap company, market cap of about $550 million right now.
Share price has been in the $15-$17 range for quite a while, trending up, I believe. We have about 34 million shares outstanding, two classes of stock, which is important to understand. Our common shares trade and have one vote per share. B shares have 10 votes per share, do not trade, but can be monetized by being converted to common. Strong insider ownership, 10%, and pretty good institutional ownership also. Okay, so where have we been the last few years during the pandemic? The pie chart on the left tells you that we have two segments. The bigger one is the aerospace segment. The smaller one is our test segment. We think, and act, and behave, and I think most investors view us as an aerospace company. That's how we present ourselves.
The pie chart on the right is important to understand. This is trailing 12-month sales, and you can see that almost two-thirds of our sales are in commercial aerospace. That's Boeing and Airbus, the big jets and the airlines that fly them. That is quite an exposure, and that is why we took it in the teeth when the pandemic hit and commercial aerospace shut down. Most suppliers to commercial aerospace are relatively well-diversified and not as concentrated as we were at the time, and are now. The smaller parts of that pie chart tell you that about 12% of our business over the last year has been general aviation, those are primarily business jets, and 21%, kinda government and defense, both military aircraft and most of our test business.
But that exposure to commercial aerospace is what really hit us. This shows you the magnitude of that hit. From pre-pandemic 2019, when we turned in about $773 million in revenue, it's quite a ride to take a company from $772 to $502 to $445. It's not something I recommend. I hope never to do it again. The good news is that we are on the rebound. In 2022, revenue came back about 20%, and the year we just closed is gonna come in somewhere around 27%-28%. We put out an early press release a couple days ago, about a week ago, that talked about fourth quarter top-line performance, and that's where we're gonna end up.
We also initiated top-level, top-line guidance for 2024 in the range of $760 million-$795 million. The midpoint of that would suggest another year of pretty strong growth, 14% or 13%. I will tell you that, we have the backlog, and the business, and the potential to very much be at the high end of that range, and that's our objective. But, you know, obviously there are-- it's a long ways out, and the recovery is still underway. So, we put that range out there, and we'll update it as we work through the year. I could talk on this slide for probably the rest of the time. I won't, but, if you look at the chart, the bar chart on the left, it's getting a little busy.
This might be the last time you see it. We've been including this in our press releases over the last couple of years. The blue portion of that chart talks about revenue, including our estimated fourth quarter sales, way over on the right, and you can see the steady upward trend from 2021, and that's positive. The green portion talks about bookings, and you can see that for almost every quarter, actually, every quarter from, like, early 2020 through up to the fourth quarter, bookings exceeded shipments, and that's a function of recovering demand and frankly, an inability to execute that demand in terms of shipments.
That's for the, you know, the majority of those quarters was when the whole world, and our company included, was dealing with the supply chain issues and the employment turnover and the great resignation and all the, all the issues that were affecting the world. But the good news is that that's straightening out, and as we enter 2024, supply chain is not back to where it was, but pretty dang close, and the employment situation has settled down. We had a couple of years of 20% turnover, when we're accustomed to 4% or 5%. I don't think our experience is unique. I think that's something that a lot of companies have been dealing with. But these days, actually, instead of losing employees or having employees resign, I'm getting a steady stream of calls from headhunters trying to place people.
So the employment picture, in our view, has turned around pretty quickly, and that's, you know, to a certain extent, good to see. The list of things on the right talks about what's driving the demand and what, what's driving what we expect continued growth will be, and it's pretty simple. At a high level, what we've seen so far is more planes flying and more planes being built. As a system supplier, that's important to us. If the planes are flying and the planes are being built, we're gonna be doing pretty well. But we also, during the pandemic, have won a number of new pieces of business, which are gonna start affecting us, on our income statement towards the end of 2024 and beyond, and some of them are listed here. We'll talk about them as we go through the presentation.
But FLRAA is a big deal for us. If you don't know what that is, I'll explain it in a minute. eVTOLs, I think, have a nice potential for us. If you don't know what that is, I'll explain in a minute. We have a couple test programs which are developing nicely, and the whole world of in-flight entertainment is a big deal to us. So, you know, everybody carries devices, everybody wants to be entertained, everybody wants to be connected, and we're in the middle of that. That's, that's a big part of what we do. So if you like consumer electronics, and you like aerospace, we're your guys. So, if you look at our press release, we cut our business a number of different ways.
I think the best way to understand it is the four strategic thrusts that are shown on the right side of this chart, and we're gonna go through these briefly. We're transitioning now to what we do as a company, but you can see almost half our revenues over the last year have been in-flight entertainment or IFEC-related. We'll talk about that shortly. Aircraft lighting and safety is a big deal to us. We're actually one of the world's largest aircraft lighting companies. There's been a ton of consolidation, and we've done our share of that also. But when you survey the landscape, we're actually one of the largest at this point. Flight-critical electrical power is a real shiny spot in terms of potential.
It's something that we've invested a lot of money in, we've won some really good programs, and have high ambitions for the near future. And then our test business, we'll close with that when we get there. So in-flight entertainment, what is that? When you sit in an airplane and you wanna watch a movie, or you wanna stream content, or you wanna cruise the internet, or you wanna plug your computer into something, there's a series of pieces of hardware that need to work together to deliver that service and allow that connectivity, allow that usage. And we are active in all those types of systems, from the antennas on top of the airplane, to file servers, to wireless access points, to power for passengers and power for the systems.
We don't sell that. We don't have a brand where we sell that retail to airlines necessarily. What we do is we sell it to the service providers, who then sell the systems to the airlines. So companies like Panasonic, Thales, Safran, the really big system providers, content providers, are big customers of ours. Viasat, Intelsat, people who provide the bits and the satellite connectivity are customers of ours, and then in some cases, we will sell systems or components to airlines, depending on how they want their aircraft configured. I would just tell you that we have, in this area, the widest product line out there. We have competitors in each of those types of hardware, but nobody else can go to a Panasonic or go to an Intelsat or go to a Viasat and say, "You know, you need this hardware.
You can make it yourself, you can buy it in little pieces from various suppliers, or you can buy pretty much everything you need from us." That is proving to be a pretty powerful approach to the market because those guys tend to think of data and bits, and they, the hardware is important, but that's not their primary focus. So in many instances, they're ready to farm that out, and we're ready to do that business for them. We have some very strong market positions. One of them is our in-seat power system or passenger power or amenity power. This is something that our company developed way back in the '90s and dominate today. We say we have 90% market share. It's probably substantially higher than that. Ruh-roh! Okay.
This has been a key stepping stone, and as you can imagine, as personal electronic devices get more common, and they proliferate... I don't know about you, I travel with four devices typically, and I'm not unique, I don't think. It's more and more common. People wanna be charged, and they don't wanna run out of power, and they need their phones when they get off the airplane, so it's becoming more and more of an expectation. Started wide body, is moving to narrow body, and we've used this platform to drive sales of those other products I was mentioning earlier. We work with 280 airlines around the world. We work with all the IFE guys.
We're offerable on all the Boeing and Airbus jets, and we've used that market presence to jumpstart our initiatives in other areas, like wireless access points, where we're quickly gaining similar market share numbers, a big strength of our company. Moving to lighting and safety, we do lighting all over the aircraft, and this is not just commercial transport. This is a commercial transport picture, but we also work in military and business jets. We work on cockpit, cabins and interiors and exterior lighting. There's a picture. It's an older picture. I think that's a Mustang in the lower right, Cessna Mustang. We do those exterior lights. That's a Joint Strike Fighter, upper left. I think that's a Pilatus PC-24 cockpit, upper right, and then lower left...
We're gonna talk about this one for a minute. This is a passenger service unit on a 737 MAX aircraft. When you ride in a 737, and you turn on your reading light, or you adjust your air gasper, that there's a whole assembly up there. We do those for each and every seat of each and every airplane that Boeing produces, and I have a couple of pictures of some of our lighting that, in ways that you don't necessarily see it. You might consider this an action shot. This is an in-flight picture of a 737 MAX, you may have read about this, operated by Alaska. You see a couple passengers with oxygen masks on. They didn't really need it. This happened at 16,000 feet, but better safe than sorry.
Those doors that came down out of the ceiling, that's our system in action, so this is one of our systems that you don't get to see in use every day, but it worked well, and everybody survived. A little embarrassing for Boeing and for the industry, but in some respects, you look at it as a safety system that worked the way it was supposed to work. Another action shot, this one's a little more dramatic. There was a collision with the Japan Airlines flight, an A350, that crashed a couple weeks ago. You probably read about this one also. Everybody got out. The other airplane involved in the accident was a Japan Coast Guard airplane. That was not as good an ending. A number of their crew died, a majority of the crew.
But I wanted to show this picture because you see a couple of slides, and you see people using the slides, and you see lights on the slides. You also see lights on the airframe, illuminating the slides, and illuminating the ground just beneath the slide, and those are ours. So there are a lot of things that go on in an airplane in terms of emergency systems that you don't see every day. You know, you hope never to see them, but they're there, and in this case, they worked very well. They got 200-some people out of an airplane in a few minutes before it burst into flames. Flight-critical electrical power, our third major thrust.
We have a unique set of capabilities in terms of electrical design, where we can bring advanced level systems that are commonplace on high-end commercial airplanes or military jets down to small aircraft. In other words, we can bring that technology and apply it economically and profitably to smaller business jets. We're the only company in the industry doing this, I would dare say, and we're developing a business franchise which I think is gonna have incredibly long legs and put us in a really good position in the future. When I say small aircraft, I'm talking about primarily first small business jets, but also small helicopters and now military drones and military helicopters, and in the future, eVTOLs. We're active in all these areas, and it's gonna be. I think it's gonna get pretty exciting.
I could talk about the technology for a long time. I'm not going to. I'm just gonna show you these two pictures, an older Learjet 45 cockpit on the left, a newer Pilatus PC-24 cockpit on the right. The big thing you will notice or might notice is the lack of the circuit breakers in the Pilatus cockpit compared to the Learjet cockpit, and that's because the system is based on electronic circuit breakers, which can be embedded into the avionics and automate emergency procedures, and make the airplane much safer to fly, and also reduce weight and increase design flexibility. It's winning over the industry, and it's doing pretty well. This is a list of new aircraft that are featuring the system.
The one I wanna talk about just for a minute is the FLRAA, which stands for Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft by Bell. It is the army's planned replacement for the Black Hawk helicopter, and we have teamed with Bell on a number of aircraft, and are doing pretty much the entire electrical system on their FLRAA, V-280 aircraft. It's in development. It's gonna be one of these long lead items or long, you know, long-term kind of programs. I think volume product or low-rate initial productions plan for, like, 2027, 2026, and series production, probably not for a couple of years after that. But our ship set content is significant, and my perspective is that by the time that program is done, which it could run for, you know...
The Black Hawk, I think, was introduced in the 1970s, and they're still building them. If they build half as many FLRAAs, it'll be the largest program that ever hits our company. So it's a pretty substantial step forward. And eVTOL, we have announced one eVTOL company as a customer. eVTOL stands for Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing. There are a large number of airframes in development. We will be announcing more agreements in the near term. We're basically working with everybody, frankly, except for one, but we're not. This is not a big internally funded science project at this point, where we're being pretty careful. We've developed some unique, off-the-shelf, modular kind of building blocks that all these companies are gonna need.
You got big batteries, you got rotors, and it's basically secondary power and battery management, and I think we're gonna end up on the vast majority of those airframes. Fully recognize that some people may think this is the next great wave to hit aerospace, and there are some people who will think this is just a, you know, a science project of, you know, never gonna go anywhere. And we don't necessarily. We come somewhere in between. I mean, certainly all the companies who are trying to develop these aircraft, there's not gonna be that much demand. They're not all gonna make it. But we wanna participate, because if they go, they could go in pretty high numbers.
There's an argument that says the aircraft will be cheaper and more reliable and be able to do things that helicopters today can't do for noise reasons or safety reasons. So we're interested in it. Here is a list of major airframes that we're on. It is not exhaustive, but if you look at it, for a company our size, it's a pretty impressive list. There's not much missing. Good balance between military, business aircraft, and commercial transport. I won't go through this. You can look at it later if you're interested. Just a few minutes on our test business. We have a test business that typically runs about 10% of our overall volume. It's about an $80 million business. We are pursuing two primary lines of work. One is with transit systems, municipal transit systems.
We're here in New York having this discussion. We won a program with New York City. It was about a $30 million program a few years ago, on one of their newer rail lines. It's called the R-211, and we are wrapping up that program. We'll wrap it up in 2024. We also won a similar program in Atlanta, and what we're doing is basically applying lessons learned from the military into these new modern trains, which are getting more and more digital, they're getting more and more complex, and they're able to use things today in a beneficial way that the military's been doing for 30 years. So we think that's a good opportunity. I'll be upfront about the challenge here is work from home. Municipalities are under stress. Transit systems are under stress. The ridership's down.
So this is a little bit of a watch item. We think we have good potential in a number of cities, first in the US, but also in other countries, both in Central, South America and Europe, and potentially Asia, but the work from home complication is a factor. The other thing we're doing here is developing a radio test capability for the military and for first responders, municipalities, fire departments, police departments, Coast Guard, Border Patrol, things like that. And organizations use highly complex radios, and we have developed a capability to test them and verify them and isolate faults that is highly desired and very beneficial. And I'm losing track of time. What do we have here?
Eleven minutes.
Eleven minutes. Perfect. We, we have won a big program here in the last year with the Marines, and we are waiting for a program with the Army. The Army program's probably a $200 million-$300 million program. We believe that that's gonna be finally signed sometime in the first half of 2024. We've been waiting for it for over a year. Those of you who follow our company have heard this over and over and over again. I can tell you that there's more movement today than there has been in the last month or month and a half. There's been more movement than the previous 13 months. So we have reason to believe that that's actually gonna happen in the first half of 2024. It's an $80 million company.
It's a $200-$300 million award. We don't know the pace yet, how many years that's gonna take to execute, but you don't have to try too hard to imagine what a $200 million award does to an $80 million company. And that's something that we think is not quite yet in our back pocket, but pretty close. The money's secure. As long as the government doesn't shut down, you know, we should be able to get that underway. So, quick financials. You know, it's been ugly. I started this presentation talking about the dip that we took with the pandemic. We are not, and were not a company sized to be profitable at $450 or $500 or $600 million in revenue.
I think you're gonna see much improved profitability going forward here at the revenue level we're talking about for 2024. We did that somewhat on purpose because we had these big programs that we wanted to win, including the radio test, including the New York City program, including FLRAA, a few others that I didn't talk about during this presentation. But you can see that sales over the last few quarters have been trending up. The $193-$195 in the fourth quarter is representative of where I think we're gonna be going in 2024, much more so than where we've been at, you know, $150, $160, $170. Bookings seem to be very positive. Everything seems to be holding together there. Record backlog, highest that it's ever been, probably too high, actually.
Our customers want delivery faster than we've been able to execute up until now. Gross profit, operating loss, again, we are not sized to be profitable at the revenue that we've been operating at. I expect the fourth quarter will be an interesting quarter with $195 million in revenue. It'll be, I think, a different, very different look than what we've been turning in recently. And finally, adjusted EBITDA, maybe the best way. We've had some high legal expenses. We have high interest costs these days. So adjusted EBITDA is maybe a better indicator of how we're performing in terms of operating results. And again, I would expect a pretty big improvement on the fourth quarter. CapEx, lower right corner. We've...
Based on our financial condition over the last year, last few years, that's been a real tight, tightly controlled item, as you might expect. That will be increasing. It has to, especially with some of the programs we're involved in, but we expect that not to be a stress item, based on improved results, going forward here. And I think that's it. So, any questions?
Could you walk through what type of profitability you would have, like, across the business at this improved revenue?
So I think, if our CFO, Dave, were here, or Nancy, he would tell you that, the best way to estimate it is to think of a incremental contribution of somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% on the incremental revenue dollar. So if you go back to the third quarter, step up to where revenue is, and should give you a pretty good estimate as to where it's gonna be. It is a little bit of an experiment. You know, last time we were at this revenue level was a long time ago, and inflation has been a very different animal since then than it was in the decade before that. So it's gonna be interesting to see.
Some of you have heard me say this, we have a high variable cost business here, and we can dial in profitability, for any revenue level. Tell me what the revenue level's gonna be, and we can, we can get to mid-teen EBITDA, I think, you know, reasonably easily. The question is what the revenue's gonna be, and that's what we've been driving for and waiting for over the last couple of years, is for revenue to bounce back into the range that we think is reasonable. What's reasonable? Reasonable is where we were, at least. We're selling the same products to the same customers. Production rates are coming back. Airline travel is coming back by most measures. It's finally reached pre-pandemic levels. So we think, you know, hopefully, at some point, we look back, and the COVID period's a little blip.
But right now, it feels like we're getting back to where we were finally after three or four years.
Could you talk about the test systems, awards you're working on and the synergies with the rest of the business?
Synergies in a conventional sense, I'd say there aren't many. It's a standalone business. It's on a different market. It is technically difficult, a lot of high-level security kinda work, so that's that kind of customer intimacy, I think, is something we're good at, so there's a similarity there. One of the things I like about it is the diversity of the revenue base. You know, I started off talking about how the pandemic was particularly cruel to us because we were so exposed to commercial aerospace. If I could back up time and live the last decade over again, I might do a few things different. One thing might be trying to diversify sources of revenue, try to be more defense military. We didn't end up where we ended up by some great strategic plan.
We just kinda went where the customers took us. The test business is part of the diversity that we have, so you can kinda look at it that way also. And I think we get these awards under track, and it should be a really good contributor. Some of you who have been around for a while remember when we had a semiconductor test business. Nobody... We ended up selling it to Advantest. We did pretty well with it. But that was one of those... The test business, in my opinion, when it's good, it's really, really good. But it's blippy. It's not very predictable, and our aerospace investors don't necessarily understand it, and-
The current test business is $80 million?
About $80 million, yeah.
How would you recognize the $200 million? How would that come over time?
That's a good question. I suspect it's about a 3, 3 or 3.5-year program. But we don't know yet, frankly. Anything else? Thank you for your time. Thank you for getting up early. Talk to y'all later.