The corona virus has decimated the aviation and travel industry. What does this mean for maintenance, repair and overhaul? Andreas Kalina, VP Marketing and Sales Europe, Africa, CIS and Baltics at MTU Maintenance, explains.
Andreas Kalina, VP Marketing and Sales Europe, Africa, CIS and Baltics at MTU Maintenance
As a result of this unprecedented crisis, airlines are extremely focused on cash management to ensure their survival. Fleet planning is highly dynamic and we are supporting our customers and partners with scenarios and engine MRO strategies to maximize the use of existing assets, but also to avoid unnecessary spend. It is possible to utilize assets for a longer period of time and only invest in small workscopes for instance, but this requires flexible, customized maintenance concepts and expertise, like that of an experienced MRO provider such as MTU Maintenance.
At present, MTU Maintenance is seeing customers move away from the traditional planning, with fixed main-tenance intervals, to more customized and individually-tailored solutions. Some airlines are concentrating on short-term savings, while others are focusing on long-term planning. We combine both goals in our smart plan-ning.
Chances and opportunities
A crisis of this dimension forces MRO providers to continuously innovate new service solutions to suit the evolving market environment. At MTU we believe it is important to maintain a highly flexible organization that can adjust quickly to market developments. We are calling this our #SmartNewNormal and are adapting our capacities to meet demand and customer needs.
During such an uncertain market environment, airline fleet planning requires a service provider like MTU to ensure they are receiving accurate and timely recommendations as to the most economic MRO strategy for their fleet. At MTU, we combine digital technology with our experience of over 20,000 shop visits in 40 years, which makes for very powerful engine analysis.
Our engine trend monitoring tool was introduced in 2006 and is continually developed. We are now taking it to the next level and integrating it into engine fleet management software.Using our software, an intelligent maintenance costing and planning tool, we generate engine fleet management scenarios and workscopes.
Smart predictions and artificial intelligence enable customized, immediate and proactive MRO planning options – not currently available on the market today and providing optimized support for more informed decisions. Fleet planning scenarios can be immediately and endlessly adapted as the financial, technical, operational, environmental, and market considerations continually change – as we are experiencing daily at this time.
MTU’s tool provides operators with real-time insight into how the crisis affects their operations and which engine to re-activate first. It enables them to unlimitedly tweak variables in their planning scenarios and see how this would affect MRO and in turn, significantly reduce cost.
For instance, planning options may include green-time engines that are leased in or taken from elsewhere in the airline’s fleet, depending on utilization, or used serviceable material. Our tool can incorporate these variables into your fleet plan to generate the most cost-effective MRO strategy for your fleet.
We see great demand for such a tool both now and in the future. And we strongly believe that digital services will support an effective post COVID-19 industry restart.