What is aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul going to look like in 2022? Join us in our forward-looking horizon scan for one of the most important years in aviation.
“2021,” Nicole Noack — the outgoing managing director of IAMA, the Independent Aircraft Modifiers’ Alliance, made up of more than two dozen members and partners — tells us, “was still about adapting to the ‘new normal’ and I feel the hope for faster relief and bounce back on transcontinental traffic was not seen turning to life. This is of course my biggest wish for 2022 — that we get on top of each wave with predictable governmental measures worldwide.”
IAMA also hopes to see a return to momentum in the MRO pipeline, converting offers into projects, and accelerating modifications.
“We see demand especially for continental traffic aircraft and connectivity solutions — and with the past two years lost, the speed required will be a challenge for the supply chain.” Noack says. She expects the biggest issue for MRO to be matching supply chain capabilities to this demand. “Over the past two years aviation lost a lot of highly trained men and women to other flourishing industries. Ramping up business again quickly and safely will be one of the biggest challenges.”
Also focussing on new business is Lufthansa Technik, following restructuring measures during the pandemic.
“The biggest risk,” warns their head of corporate foresight and market intelligence, Sven Taubert, “is still a bounce-back of the global pandemic that would destroy the significant recovery we have achieved so far. In light of Omicron and maybe future variants of the virus, the danger of travel restrictions or other measures is not as big as it was in 2020, but it is far from over. The best way to mitigate it is to finally get the pandemic under control, with vaccinations as the silver bullet.”
Digitalisation looms large on the radar for both Noack and Taubert.
“Many airlines have used the crisis to take a deep dive into digitalisation and to explore how it can improve their technical fleet management. If 2022 brings the hoped-for recovery from the crisis, we expect many airlines to build on their experiences during the crisis and further foray into this field,” Taubert says, citing digital operations tool suites as a particular area of likely interest for airlines.
Noack points to the risks of not engaging with the digitalisation agenda sufficiently nor deeply enough, which leads to needing to fall back on manual processing and service reductions — at the airport and on the aircraft — to reduce passenger-crew contact.
Noack says she is looking forward to innovation in sustainability, particularly around reuse, focussing on “cycles instead of lines, implementing recycling to aviation parts, not only at end-of-life but also within the modification lifecycle. I am sure we will see more development here in cross-stakeholder initiatives, which would enable scale.”
“Sustainability gains more and more awareness,” Noack predicts for 2022, “and this has to be heard by operators as well as MRO. While we often talk about the ‘big three’, electrification, hydrogen, and SAF, we should not forget that we have 25,000 aircraft in the market which will not change in the blink of an eye.”
“There is a time of transition and we have to use this to implement measures to decrease fuel consumption — higher efficiency, less weight — but also implement solutions to reduce waste and enable repair and recycling for aircraft material,” says Noack.
On the technology side, Taubert says that Lufthansa Technik is looking forward to the introduction of its new sharkskin drag reduction product, AeroSHARK, which is expected to deliver a 1% fuel saving and concomitant emissions reduction on Lufthansa Cargo’s 777F fleet, where it will launch this coming year.
Taubert also points to a new hydrogen technology ground demonstrator in Hamburg, developed in cooperation with the city’s airport, German research body DLR and ZAL, and the Hamburg aeronautical research centre. Practical tests across ground handling, MRO, components and other procedures will begin on receipt of a decommissioned Airbus A320 in the spring.
Author: John Walton
Published: 12th April 2022
Feature image: Copyright Lufthansa
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