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Comment by someonebaggy | Hacker News Reader

aaS means you don't even rent them, you just pay someone to come and lay a certain number of bricks by any means necessary.

Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.

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I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.

"Under TotalCare, an airline pays Rolls-Royce a fixed rate per engine flying hour." [0] Not quite kN-h indeed. But the idea is similar (and more simple to implement, I suppose): you don't really own the engine, you pay for what you use.

[0] https://www.meritshot.com/rolls-royce-case-study

EDIT: wording

I wouldn't consider that to be not owning the engine. It seems to me that the airline does own the plane and the engines on it, and this is more of a usage-based support/maintenance/repair subscription service provided by the engine manufacturer. If you suddenly didn't want it for some reason, I don't think RR could or would force you to take off the engines and ship it back to them. They just wouldn't provide you with the support and service that you stopped paying for.

In the end the result is pretty similar as these engines are useless without regular maintenance and the engine manufacturer likely does not give the knowledge away to do it without them.

As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.

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