Emre Uğur

                                                   Maintenance and Overhaul

Aircraft maintenance is the overhaul, repair, inspection or modification of an aircraft or aircraft component. Maintenance, Repair and overhaul providers play an essential role in sustaining the world’s airline fleets. MRO is the blanket term for all the services relating to assuring aircraft safety and airworthiness. The largest providers typically offer the three main MRO capabilities: airframe, engine and component services. Engine maintenance makes up the largest proportion of the global market (35%), followed by component (22%) and airframe heavy maintenance (13%). Line maintenance accounts for just over one-fifth of the global market (22%), with modifications making up the balance. Most major providers cater only for only commercial customers with the minority offering services to government and defence clients. Maintenance accounts for approximately 10% of airlines’ costs.

Advanced technology gives service-centric companies many advantages. Not only does service provide an additional source of revenue, it provides a way to build relationships with customers and create long-term loyalties that supersede price and budget issues. Relationships can be built around value-added sharing of historical data, collaboration on design and predictive analysis of future needs and trends. Technology available today also allows companies to be more strategic, responsive and in tune to customer needs. This level of customer intimacy generates insights about future needs and allows companies to plan and schedule workforce, inventory and capacity with confidence.  All of these insights lead to greater forecasting abilities and efficiency—necessary for riding out periods of volatile pricing and market pressures.

The ability to respond quickly to service bulletins and aircraft directives is essential for allowing contractors to view the entire product lifecycle as a closed loop—from design and engineering through delivery and preventive maintenance and ongoing repairs. Tracking the details, from source documents to modifications and as-serviced configurations are critical to the level of confidence that must be present.

I’d like to tell you a success story which made by Lufthansa Technik. Lufthansa Technik will expand their successful co-operation in pre-defined VIP cabin completions by offering the Elite concept on the ACJ319. The new "ACJ319 Elite" product will be officially launched at EBACE 2015 and is available immediately. The Airbus ACJ319 Elite complements the modular ACJ319 concepts and fully customised cabins that are already available from Airbus Corporate Jets and Lufthansa Technik.

    ACJ319 Elite concept

With all these new exciting features and options in place, however, one thing has not changed: the ACJ319 Elite will continue to impress customers with full VIP cabin completion and value, plus an unrivalled rapidity, starting from just six months layover time.

What about aerospace and defense? As a result of a sluggish economy and reduction in military spending for new weapons systems and aircraft, today's maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) operations must focus on improving asset turnaround time, maximizing throughput capacity, and increasing reliability of existing assets, in order to compete, grow, and profit. Exacerbating this trend is the growing complexity of performance-based SLAs and associated risks which are now compelling OEMs, supplier, and service operators to understand, design, and implement best-practice and Lean MRO initiatives. This, in turn, is driving many aerospace and defense companies and third-party MRO firms to employ Lean practices throughout their MRO operations.