Aviation’s return to service after COVID-19 has started in some regions and countries, seems well underway in others, and has yet to begin elsewhere — and the return is a spiky one in terms of both demand and supply as dynamics like new variants and government restrictions change. This lack of predictability has dramatically impacted the entire aviation value chain, including maintenance, repair and overhaul.
While “the majority of maintenance on airframe and engines is cycle-based,” Brian Sartain, senior vice president for repair and engineering at AAR, tells us, “some systems such as landing gear have a calendar maximum between overhauls. Landing Gear, Evacuation Slides and other calendar based schedules have always been managed separately from cycle-based systems and have not really caused any issues in the post-pandemic world.”
When it comes to engines, concurs SR Technics head of product management Pierre Berthelot, “engine maintenance is solely hours-based, there are no calendar-based inspections or maintenance required, except for the preservation of stored engines.”
“The drive to get as much of the domestic US fleet back into the air has created a shortage of available slots in the airframe [maintenance] market,” Sartain says, but notes that overall “the world of component MRO is still seeing lower levels of volume than would be expected. The large demand in airframe maintenance is creating shortages of skilled labour that were common pre-pandemic.”
Sartain notes that some employers — including, he says, AAR — were able to retain enough of their workforce over the pandemic to be able to meet the spikes in demand.
The concern, Caroline Vandedrinck, senior vice president of business development at SR Technics tells us, is that “some MROs might not be able to re-activate their services fast enough.”
Indeed, ensuring the availability of skilled and qualified technicians has been a major challenge in MRO. “As the pandemic hit the hardest in the USA, we were forced to furlough many workers and shut down portions of our facilities to conserve cash,” Sartain explains.
(Note that “furlough” in this US context — essentially, forced unpaid leave — means the opposite of “furlough” in the UK and some other countries, where it is a government scheme paying part of workers’ usual wage to support businesses in reducing temporarily the hours of their employees without losing their skills, also known as short-time working, the German Kurzarbeit or French chômage partiel.)
Highlighting the impact of not providing this sort of employment support, “as domestic travel returned to the US, and carriers readied their fleets for an increase in travel, many MROs found that their displaced workforce had moved into other industries,” Sartain says. “One strategy AAR employed was to win work from cargo carriers and lessors to fill these gaps and maintain the core workforce. Even as the pandemic recovery is underway, these new customers are an important part of our business. “
The Swiss government is supporting SR Technics — and other employers across industries — with the short-time working scheme, enabling it “to ramp up capacity again quickly and when required without having lost knowledge and expertise,” says Vandedrinck. “In addition, we are adding more in-house repair capabilities and work on new engine licensing.”
New technologies and digitalisation can help to smooth some of the spikiness in both demand and supply of skilled labour — both within the MRO sector and in related activities.
“Digital tools, like augmented reality tools [section 3-1280 —Ed.] that allow the FAA to remotely audit and inspect our facilities, have been very helpful in coping with increasing demand in return to service while travel for federal agencies is still restricted,” says AAR’s Sartain. “These tools along with paperless ERP systems in the hangar are helping us meet the current demand.”
SR Technics, meanwhile, believes that additive parts manufacturing and 3D printing will show benefits, with head of product management Pierre Berthelot citing “predictive maintenance, which is supported by engine processing data, including Quick Turn Line and on-site fast and flexible repairs, including module replacement as an alternative to a shop visit.”
Much of the industry remains in crisis mode
Zooming out for the big picture, says SR Technics’ Caroline Vandedrinck, “engine MRO is impacted by life limiters on the engines — Life-Limited Parts — as well as lease end conditions: minimum engine potential required at the time of engine return to the lessor. The entire industry is still in cash-conservation mode, and still burning as much green time as possible until LLPs limits are reached.”
While some airlines are starting to plan for the long term and book in heavy shop visits, Vandedrinck says that SR Technics is “seeing requests for light workscopes to take aircraft/engines out of storage and make them ready to fly. Performing light workscopes help minimize financial exposure and favours phasing in new technologies over maintaining older aircrafts.”
As a result, newer parked airplanes are favoured over older in-service airframes.
One capacity crunch has been the maintenance requirements for parked and stored aircraft, creating a labour supply tension between these needs and those for engine overhaul in particular.
Some customers are also postponing heavy shop time, instead using green time engines or lease engines. This, Vandedrinck says, “is creating pent-up demand in our opinion that will eventually come back — maybe not fully — but in large quantities. Currently, we see that demand comes from operators but is dictated by asset owners. Their priority is to avoid investing in an asset that may not monetise, and would therefore rather cash in the accumulated maintenance reserves. It is completely different with owned fleets, where the operator has much more freedom with green time optimisation and is simply avoiding shop visits for the time being.”
That capacity gap, and eventual corresponding spike, will continue to present challenges to the industry. A key question in managing it will be the intersection of several accelerated and COVID-focussed trends: older aircraft being retired, longer maintenance intervals for newer aircraft, the growing digitalisation of MRO, the industry’s return over the next three years, and the amount of support available from governments. Navigating these complex challenges will be crucial for MRO — and for the rest of the industry.
Author: John Walton
Published: 13th January 2022
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