Innovating together to restart aviation — and aircraft

In the depths of winter in Helsinki, the temperatures are below zero, the sun rises at after 9am and sets before 4pm, and dozens of aircraft have spent months in hibernation at one of the world’s most northerly hubs rather than carrying passengers and cargo across the globe. But soon, it will be time to start them back up again.

The story repeats itself the world over, as airlines scrambled to ground and park their aircraft in March without a real understanding of when they might be back in the air. But as vaccine candidates emerge, and the world looks to a brighter springtime, we sat down with Marko Anttila, head of engineering at MRO operator Finnair Technical Services to learn more about how they’ll get back there.

Inside one of aviation’s biggest-ever challenges

Anttila starts by laying out the situation for aircraft in flight-ready parking, and for those in longer-term storage. “An aircraft in flight ready parking has mainly the engine covers installed, all the air data sensors are protected, the APU source has been covered up,” he explains.

Meanwhile, “in a stored aircraft, there will be additional covers, the landing gear would be protected from the environment, the windows are covered, and for example, inside the cabin the seats would be also protected by plastic. Also the storage procedure requires quite extensive lubrication and application of corrosion inhibition compounds to the landing gear area, and a typical example it [the procedure] would say that the inlet cowl lip skin area will be separately treated against the environment. The fuel tanks are normally filled to 10% of their maximum quantity, and then we have regular checks of any possible water ingress and microbiological growth in the fuel.”

Those regular checks extent to other systems as well: protection, lubrication, and monthly run-up of the engine when in flight-ready parking, for example.

From the cold of full storage, though, it will take one to two weeks to restart an aircraft, with multiple engineers working — physically distanced — across the airframe. The challenges in storing so much of the world’s fleet, and in bringing it back into service, are unprecedented.

“One of the challenges,” Anttila explains, “has been the pace [at which] things started to evolve in March, so [this] has been one of the biggest challenges. So far the environment in Finland has been quite favourable. We’ve been living in the spring and summer season, but with winter coming that creates some new challenges for us that we need to meet, to resolve.”

“The climate in Finland during the wintertime is not the most favourable for the aircraft in storage,” Anttila says drily. “So there are some winter precautions that we need to start performing on the aircraft: For example, further lubrications on the aircraft.”

Working together: more than simply a slogan

Airframers, engine-makers, regulators, storage location operators, MRO houses and many other parts of the industry have been working especially closely together all year, in a spirit of collaboration that certainly feels like a bright spark of positivity in an otherwise dim year. A spark that we might cultivate over the northern hemisphere winter and rekindle in aviation’s metaphorical post-COVID spring, perhaps?

Antilla explains that “the parking and storage of aircraft has been pretty much a learning process for the whole industry during the COVID-19 crisis. Obviously, we have made our own risk assessments regarding the safety implications, and all the parking and storage procedures obviously take into account the safety aspect.”

Indeed, reports of issues with some aircraft following storage have been surfacing, such as a Wizz Air Airbus A321 with pitot probes blocked by insects, as well as airworthiness directives and information bulletins on topics ranging from nickel-cadmium batteries to the risks arising from disinfecting aircraft more frequently and stringently than previously.

“One example” of how airlines are mitigating these problems, says Anttila, “would be that if an aircraft is in parking or storage more than three months, we will always fly a non-commercial test flight prior to entering into any commercial service. During the re-entry to service there are lots of different tests and inspections are performed to verify that the aircraft is air worthy. Obviously, safety aspects are the most important thing when we return the aircraft back to service.”

New technologies, too, are proving their worth, with the efficiency gains of tools like connected workflow devices, electronic manuals, and other elements of the Internet of Things in aviation never more welcome. There are, of course, risks to adopting new technologies under pressure and at pace, so ensuring that this work is safe, secure, simple — and replicable — will be key.

The range and extent of collaborative work between the full range of industry players has been remarkable this year, with Anttila highlighting that “this has been a really new situation for the whole industry. And there has been a lot of collaboration between airlines. IATA has been really active. And a lot of airlines have been attending those forums, we’ve seen that the aircraft manufacturers have been really flexible and really supportive to operators during this time. We have several forums with different airlines formed, where we go through the challenges that we face going into parking and storage activity.”

It’s a truism that aviation is a business in which learning is continuous, and indeed the industry is reaping the benefits this year of its strong safety institutions, best-practice sharing commitments and international cooperation — and that spirit of collaboration certainly feels like something the industry could do with learning from and formalising as it emerges from COVID-19.

“It has been really a learning process ever since the outbreak of COVID-19,” Anttila concludes. “It still feels like every day we learn something new about the whole parking and storage procedure.”

As with the entire experience of COVID-19 within (and outside) aviation, the pressures of the pandemic have in part shattered the industry and in part forged it — and its people — even stronger. As 2021 sees the industry’s restart and begins its acceleration away from what feels like a standing start, how can we bring the spirit of learning, collaboration and cooperation that this crisis has driven into aviation’s future?

Join the conversation

We’re talking about this in in our industry challenges area, let us know what you think – how do we exploit the unexpected benefits of collaboration and inspiration that have come out of the pandemic to foster a brighter future for aviation?