After 21 years in service, 32,966 flights, and 54,710 hours in the sky, Finnair’s second Airbus A319 is being recycled — right at home at Helsinki-Vantaa airport. It’s the first time that a modern commercial airliner has been dismantled in Finland, and the first time that Finnair is using its inhouse MRO staff to do a large part of the work.
By John Walton
13-April- 2021
The airline could, of course, have farmed the work out. There are “several players in the field in Europe that are providing these kinds of services,” says Timo Rossi, project manager for the part-out of OH-LVB. While the airline has used some before, including AerFin for its first retired A319, OH-LVA, the combination of the reduction in staff time demand during the COVID-19 crisis, space to carry it out, its wider sustainability strategy, and a strong desire to keep experienced and valuable engineering staff occupied, means that the airline decided to do a large part of the work itself.
Finnair started the process in the hangars at HEL by removing everything that can be removed: for the A319, that’s some 900-1000 individual components and parts. These include wing components, engines, landing gear, and the APU, and will be refurbished and repaired as necessary to be stocked for reuse elsewhere in the airline’s A320 family fleet. It’s a complicated task to be certain, and one that’s a strong tick in the “reuse” column of the sustainability spreadsheet for this programme.
Following that, the aircraft will start to be disassembled, with industrial recycling specialist partner Kuusakoski removing the wings — and possibly the tail — before the whole lot is transported to the recycling site, some five kilometres away in Vantaa, the same city in which Helsinki Airport is located.
The principal material recycled for use by other industries will be the aluminium from which A319 ceo-generation aircraft are primarily constructed, and which is widely used in everything from electric cabling to cookware to the proverbial beer cans.
“When we’re talking about the older aircraft, aluminium is the main material coming out of the recycling process,” Rossi says, explaining that Kuusakoski has its own aluminium foundry to refine the metals removed from the aircraft. “They are manufacturing or producing aluminium blocks out of the aluminium coming from the aircraft. “
“For the wiring coming out from the aircraft they are separating the insulation materials and then the copper, and using those as well, in any other industry that is using those materials,” Rossi continues.
So exactly how much of OH-LVB will be recycled? Even Finnair isn’t precisely certain at this point.
“There is an estimation that with this aircraft, the recycling rate is going to be something like between 90 and 95%,” Rossi says, and this rate will increase for subsequent generations of airframes. “Some of the manufacturers have stated that the recyclability rate might be as high as 98% with the new aircraft. So there’s a clear, positive curve for that. I think they also need to think more closely about the recycling when they are designing new aircrafts.”
Non-recyclables at this stage include materials like fluids coming out of the aircraft systems, as well as some cabin equipment, including seat foams, treated with substances like fire and smoke retardants.
On the certification and regulation side, for Finnair’s part, stripping the aircraft before the recyclers get to it, “they are basically doing the normal Part 145 aircraft maintenance work — we are an operator and then we also have maintenance facility. So we are doing the normal tasks that we are also able to do already — component removals, draining the systems and, that sort of stuff,” Rossi says. “It’s all done under the Part 145 licence. I think we have had to buy one or two tools, but otherwise we have all the skills and all the equipment already, so it has been pretty easy from that point of view.”
Those tools, Rossi says, mean that Finnair is able to reap the benefits of its previous rounds of digitalisation within its MRO business: iPad-enabled work tasking, streamlined programme and project management, online manuals, and so on. The crucial challenges have come, however, around processes.
“We have to learn — not everything, but let’s say the whole process,” Rossi explains. “We have to learn it from start to finish, how it’s going to be done, what are all the aspects, things that needs to take into account, and consideration and discussing with the authorities.”
Those include a variety of actors, parts of which the different parts of Finnair may be engaging for the first time: airport operator Finavia, the civil air regulator in the form of the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom, and the local authority, the City of Vantaa.
Finnair expects to have the whole programme of work completed by late March or early April, at which point the airline will assess its success.
Even now, Rossi admits, success and future recycling is not guaranteed: “we cannot say at this point, because this is a project that we are doing for the first time. Now we are basically testing how this goes, and then, after the project is ready, we are going through all the economical points of view and then the environmental stuff, the recycling rates, the whole process — going through the numbers and seeing how useful and how beneficial this was for us.”
Looking towards the future, a big question for aircraft recycling revolves around the ‘plug and play’ trend of modular MRO tasks that airframers have designed into the latest and next generation of aircraft to reduce hangar time.
While these may mean an easier reuse opportunity for some parts, “I think with the new aircraft, there is going to be a lot of, let’s say, smaller, separate parts that that can be used in the future, if these sorts of part-outs are going to be done,” Rossi says.
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We’re talking about this in our industry challenges area – Is do-it-yourself recycling the best way for airlines to meet sustainability targets, and the answer to keeping valuable staff busy in quiet periods due to ongoing COVID-19 impacts?
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