Tag: Featured Story

With more than 30 years of experience in the aviation industry, Jean-Marc Lenz became CEO of SR Technics in September of 2019 just before the pandemic struck. Aviation Maintenance Editor-in-Chief, Joy Finnegan, had the opportunity to sit down with him in Atlanta, Georgia, recently to learn how the company navigated the past several years and their big plans for the future.

AVM: Give our readers some highlights of what SR Technics did to make it through the pandemic years and what you are working on right now?

JML: The company is coming out of the pandemic on the right spot. We designed our strategy by focusing mainly on the engine business. During the pandemic, we made sure that all the non-engine-related businesses, especially those that were loss-making, were completely removed or sold. Now, we have an 80% engine-focused business. This engine business basically has two pockets. The main business where we do a lot of activities on the PW 4000 and on the CFM 56, where we still have a really nice growth story for the next 10 years or so. That’s the cash cow for the company. And we continue to be focused on that business, especially on the repair side of the house. That’s exactly the core of the business.

AVM: What are you focusing on for the future?

JML: The new business in the future is the PW1100G-JM (also known as the GTF – geared turbofan) and the LEAP-1B. [We have] a big contract for the PW1100G-JM engines for the A320neo with full disassembly, assembly and test; more than 1,000 shop visits for the next 10 years. We start next year, 2024, with the first engine induction. We are in a hiring phase, in a preparation phase, in the full industrialization process to prepare. Recently we announced the start of the construction work for reactivation of a second test cell to expand test capabilities and capacities at Zurich Airport, Switzerland. It will be redesigned for this new engine. That will be a rapid ramp up, basically going rapidly to up to 100 visits a year. The test cell 2 will be enlarged to a seven-by-eight-meter cross-section and will receive state-of-the-art data acquisition and instrumentation systems. SR Technics and Safran Test Cells have designed test cell with environmental compatibility and sustainability in mind, introducing fit-for-purpose equipment for the lowest energy consumption and technology, such as thermal waste heat recovery.

AVM: So far, how is the project of reactivation of the test cell going?

JML: Every big investment like that will have its challenges that’s for sure. But for now, basically the project is well set up, all the preparations are made. We had the groundbreaking event in April that indicates that the full planning and design phase is behind us. And we have good partners.

AVM: Talk about your goals for the company?

JML: Our goal is to double our business in the next five years. We are building infrastructure in Zurich, opening new production facilities and increasing our workforce with around 500 people within the next few years to extend our capabilities for the GTF and LEAP engines.

AVM: That is an ambitious goal to double your business in the next five years. How will you get there?

JML: Yes. The GTF and LEAP, of course, will be a large portion of it as they are the actual engine types which will be in a growth phase. Today, we are doing around 200 shop visits a year, and in five years from now we will do 350 – 400. That’s the goal.

AVM: What about your work on the LEAP-1B?

JML: The strategy for the LEAP-1B, it’s different from the GTF. Obviously, we cannot do two new engine types at the same time, at the same speed. So, on the LEAP, we start up on a different pace. We have already started on the hospital lines. We do smaller repairs on the quick turn lines. On LEAP-1A we are about to launch a couple of work scopes together with the OEM basically to also ramp up a little bit more rapidly on this quick turn line with dedicated work scopes.

AVM: What about ongoing work for other engines?

JML: Last year we introduced more than 50 new repairs on the CFM 56. So that’s something which is ongoing as we speak. It’s important and for me, that’s one of the most important points for the future. Those engines need to be repaired. And by having new repair capabilities, it also means we have availability on USM (used serviceable materials). The USM market is important also for the repair on that engine. That simply increases the service offerings we have for customers.

AVM: Talk a little bit about the USM market. How are you incorporating that into your business plan?

JML: We are working with a lot of partners on finding engines to be torn down now and we are supporting basically quicker turnaround times. We are making sure that the problems in the supply chains are overcome, especially with us. We were always doing that. But with that big increase in demand, it’s now very important.

AVM: How do you see the supply chain issues resolving in the near future?

JML: I’m optimistic. The supply chain issue will be resolved in the next six to 12 months. Even in a more pessimistic view it takes a little bit longer, but it will be resolved. It’s a matter of having raw material back and having the people back. Just needs a little bit of time.

AVM: With that growth comes the need for skilled labor. Everyone’s talking about how difficult it is to find skilled labor right now. Are you experiencing this as deeply as we are here in the U.S.?

JML: We also have issues with finding the right skilled labor. But I have to admit Switzerland is in a better position. First of all, we have a very nice apprenticeship program. That was ongoing and we didn’t stop it during the pandemic. It’s a self-feeding, in-house system. Secondly, we are hiring, obviously from all over the place (outside of aviation) in Switzerland and retraining those technicians, basically for the aviation business. And thirdly, we are hiring across all of Europe, so people are joining Switzerland because it is good place to live. So, in other terms, we are still finding the necessary people. We will have to hire 400 to 500 in the next three to four years. It’s over 100 a year.

AVM: Let’s talk about the digitization of business. SR Technics has done some serious work in that area. Tell us about what you’ve done and who you’ve partnered with?

JML: Yes, absolutely. Digitalization in our industry is very important for various reasons. The first is efficiency. The second is traceability. And also to make sure that interconnectivities in the processes are 100% understood. So, in the word digitalization, there is much more behind that than just a new IT system. It’s about making sure that all the processes in our industry are, as I said, interconnected reflected by bringing in a new agile cloud-based ERP platform. We redesigned all our operating processes to fit with that system. We are working with HCLTech to digitally transform SR Technics’ operations. HCLTech will implement a new greenfield SAP S/4HANA environment hosted on Microsoft Azure using RISE with SAP. We will implement iMRO, HCLTech’s MRO industry add-on for SAP. This new system will be implemented starting 2024.

AVM: Talk about the implementation process — how do you prepare?

JML: The implementation is much more complicated than just transferring data. You only do a digitalization project like this one every 20 years. The first thing you have to do is to clean up your processes. The second thing you have to do is to make sure that the processes are completely lean and ready to be digitalized. And then you need to ensure that your processes are fitting with the standard of the chosen systems. Then you have to make decisions about the needed add-ons and only then can you implement the system. So, it’s quite a major move for the company. And it’s a huge investment not only financially but in people, in processes.

AVM: How do you clean up these processes and make them completely lean, as you said? How do you determine where you need work?

JML: In the beginning to figure out which system would fit we worked with a consultant. But for this, that’s where we have a special team in place, a project team. That [internal] project team started those activities, I would say two years ago already.

AVM: It’s been about a year since opening the new six-bay hangar and back-shop facilities in Malta. How is that updated facility doing?

JML: We’ve been in Malta for more than 10 years. Why there? Because at that time we were choosing in different location in Europe where we would have a lower cost location. We started with a rented hangar. About a year ago we moved into the new hangar. Cost for us was a factor, but also location for our customer base and where do we find the necessary skills? Malta was, and still is, the right place because the availability of skilled labor was very good. It fit and was feeding very well to our customer base. After a while we realized that the two-bay operation was too small. We increased to three bays with temporary hangers. At that point in time, we decided to build a new hangar with the government’s help in supporting that kind of development. The new hangar was finalized last year and we moved into the new six-bay hangar. Now we are operating a five-day operation there.

AVM: You recently launched a new Sustainable Engine Alliance. Please tell our readers about this project.

JML: It’s something new, very important and is a strategic topic. We have a role to play in that. We decided to start an engine alliance about sustainability. The target is to reduce the footprint or avoid the CO2 emissions for the full cycle of a shop visit, starting from the removal of the engine at the airline and continuing in each stop of the process including transferring the engine to the shop, disassembling the engines, all the activities connected to logistics, on repairs, and also to reassemble and test the engine and to transport the engine again. So, the full repair cycle is managed and analyzed on the search. We’re going to be able to show the reduction of the CO2 footprint with this project. I think that will be much more important in the future and I’m quite sure that airline customers will be looking more and more at those kinds of activities when selecting their providers.

Former NTSB and FAA investigator Jeff Guzzetti discusses what many believe to be the most striking example of an airline accident caused by systemic deficiencies in maintenance and safety culture.

As a newly hired NTSB field investigator in the early 1990s, I was assigned to a field office that was co-located at NTSB headquarters in Washington, D.C. This location allowed me to attend final NTSB board meetings in which the causes and factors of major airline accidents were presented and discussed in public. One such meeting occurred in July 1992 to adopt the final report of an accident that occurred nine months earlier on September 11, 1991.

The accident involved Continental Express Flight 2574, an Embraer 120 Brasilia turboprop airplane (see graphic above) that broke apart over a cornfield near Eagle Lake, Texas, killing the two flight crewmembers, one flight attendant, and 11 passengers. This commuter airline accident continues to serve as a striking example of a tragedy caused by systemic deficiencies in maintenance, and it introduced the topic of safety culture as an essential tenet in aviation safety.

Flight 2574 departed Laredo, Texas, at 9:09 a.m. and was destined for Houston Intercontinental Airport. About an hour into the flight, as it was descending through 12,000 feet on approach to Houston, the airplane suddenly exploded in flames. Several eyewitnesses described the Embraer 120 as “flying normally … wings level, slightly nose down” when it was suddenly “consumed by a fireball with wingtips and part of a tail protruding.” They watched as the airplane entered into a flat spin until impacting the ground, shedding parts during its descent (see graphic 2).

Many of the separated parts of the airplane were located within a two-mile radius of the main wreckage. The horizontal stabilizer, located on top of the T-tail, was lying about 650 feet southwest of the main wreckage (see graphic 3). Some of the structure from the upper third of the vertical stabilizer was still attached to the horizontal stabilizer. The lower two-thirds of the vertical stabilizer remained attached to the tail cone in the main wreckage. The leading edge/deice boot assembly for the left side was missing from the horizontal stabilizer, but was later found in a small corral about one mile west of the main impact site. This part was the first chunk of wreckage found along the wreckage path, indicating that it was the first to separate from the airplane in flight.

Black Box Data and Recorded Radar

One of the first actions that NTSB performs in an airline accident investigation is to recover the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR). In this case, their quick recovery yielded valuable data. A readout of the FDR showed the airplane was descending through 11,500 feet at 260 knots when it abruptly pitched down and entered a steep dive. A negative load factor of at least 3.3 g was reached about one second after the upset, with a corresponding decrease in airplane pitch attitude.

The CVR picked up sounds of objects being upset in the cockpit followed immediately by a human “grunt” at the time of the accident. The remaining sounds heard were produced by the airplane’s aural warning systems along with mechanical sounds that were consistent with an inflight structural failure.

The NTSB also collected and analyzed recorded radar data that traced the breadcrumb trail of Flight 2574 during the accident flight. Graphic 4 shows the radar-derived ground track of flight 2574, selected sounds from the CVR, and the wreckage distribution. Graphic 5 provides a close-up view of part of the ground track and wreckage distribution. It was clear to investigators that the horizontal stabilizer had separated from the fuselage before ground impact. Investigators surmised that the loss of the leading edge/deice boot assembly exposed the front spar of the left horizontal stabilizer to the airstream, prompting an aerodynamic stall that greatly reduced the downforce produced by the horizontal stabilizer, as shown in graphic 6, next page.

But why did the horizontal stabilizer come apart in flight? Investigators quickly realized that the 47 screw fasteners that would have attached the upper surface of the leading edge assembly to the left horizontal stabilizer were missing. Additionally, there was no evidence of distress in the upper attachment holes or any other indication that the screws were installed when the assembly separated from the horizontal stabilizer.

Systemic Maintenance Deficiencies

The NTSB review of the maintenance records revealed that two weeks prior to the accident, during a fleet-wide campaign to examine aircraft deice boots for winter operation, a quality control inspector had noted both leading edge boots on the accident airplane had dry-rotted pin holes along the entire length of the boots. So, on the night before the accident, the airline’s maintenance control office scheduled both deice boots to be replaced. NTSB interviews with maintenance personnel revealed that this maintenance action occurred during a shift change.

The Continental Express General Maintenance Manual (GMM) had FAA-approved procedures for shift turnovers that required briefings by mechanics to supervisors, briefings by outgoing supervisors to incoming supervisors, completion of maintenance and inspection shift turnover forms (so that oncoming personnel would be aware of incomplete work), and the documentation of incomplete work that would be noted by the mechanic on the reverse sides of work cards. The Safety Board concluded that the GMM contained clear procedures, which, if followed, could have prevented the accident.

Investigators interviewed a dozen mechanics who had worked on the airplane. They discovered that the events during the maintenance and inspection of the aircraft on the night before the accident were directly causal to the accident. Several errors were made by specific individuals responsible for the airworthiness of the airplane.

For example, the second shift supervisor responsible for the accident airplane failed to solicit an end-of-shift verbal report (shift turnover) from the two mechanics he assigned to remove the deice boots. Moreover, he failed to give a turnover to the oncoming third shift supervisor. To add insult to injury, the second shift supervisor had demonstrated recent substandard performance that was not addressed by management. For example, one month before the accident, he “missed a crack in the inspection of an engine exhaust stack” on one occasion, and he “missed 15 task cards” while performing maintenance on another occasion.

The Safety Board concluded that the upper row of screws that had been removed from the leading edge of the left horizontal stabilizer was undetected because the approved procedures in the GMM were not followed by the maintenance personnel directly charged with evaluating the airworthiness of the airplane before it was returned to service.

However, in the end, they determined that the reasons for the errors and the overall failure of the maintenance program were complex and not simply related to a single failure by any single individual. The NTSB also found no evidence that the two pilots were informed of the work that had been performed on the tail. The top of the horizontal stabilizer on the airplane’s T-tail rests about 20 feet above the ground; therefore, the flight crew could not have seen the area of the missing screws on top of the leading edge/deice boot during their normal preflight inspection. However, if they had been informed of the maintenance, they might have discussed the work and conducted a visual inspection of the stabilizer’s upper surface.

Another factor discussed in the final NTSB board meeting was the failure of Continental Express maintenance and quality assurance personnel to treat the deicing boot replacement — which requires removal of the leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer — as a Required Inspection Item (RII). By doing so, a separate inspection by quality control inspectors would have been required of the work performed that night. Even though regulations clearly establish that the horizontal stabilizer is an RII, Continental Express maintained that the deice boot/leading edge assembly was a “non-structural” item, and therefore not subject to the more rigorous inspection requirements.

Inadequate Safety Orientation

The NTSB report identified “substandard practices and procedures and oversight” by numerous individuals, each of whom could have prevented the accident. Included were mechanics, quality assurance inspectors, and supervisors, all of whom demonstrated a “general lack of compliance with the approved procedures.” Departures from approved procedures included failures to solicit and give proper shift-change turnover reports, failures to use maintenance work cards as approved, failures to complete required maintenance/inspection shift turnover forms, and a breach in the integrity of the quality control function by virtue of an inspector serving as a mechanic’s assistant during the early stages of the repair work performed on the accident aircraft.

Furthermore, investigators discovered two previous maintenance actions taken on the accident aircraft, each of which departed from the approved procedures, and each of which involved employees different from those engaged in the deice boot replacement. The first event was the replacement of an elevator without use of the required manufacturer-specified balancing tools, and the second was a failure to follow specified procedures and logging requirements in response to an engine overtorque.

Finding no. 18 in the report sums up the issue of Safety Culture: “The deficiencies noted in the maintenance department at Continental Express indicate that the airline’s management did not instill an adequate safety orientation in its maintenance personnel by emphasizing the importance of adhering to procedure.” During the months and years after this investigation, the words “safety orientation” were replaced by the term “safety culture” in the lexicon of aviation safety. The seeds of Safety Management Systems (SMS) for aviation were planted.

The NTSB determined that the probable cause of the accident was “the failure of Continental Express maintenance and inspection personnel to adhere to proper maintenance and quality assurance procedures for the airplane’s horizontal stabilizer deice boots that led to the sudden in-flight loss of the partially secured left horizontal stabilizer leading edge and the immediate severe nose-down pitch-over and breakup of the airplane.” Contributing to the cause was “the failure of the Continental Express management to ensure compliance with the approved maintenance procedures, and the failure of FAA surveillance to detect and verify compliance with approved procedures.”

A Rare Dissenting Opinion

But the story doesn’t stop there. Following the adoption of the probable cause, a rare “dissenting opinion” was issued by one of the NTSB board members — Dr. John K. Lauber, considered a giant in the field of human factors. Lauber wrote: “I am perplexed by the majority decision that the actions of Continental Express senior management were not [determined to be] causal in this accident. It is clear … that the series of failures which led directly to the accident were not the result of an aberration, but rather resulted from the normal, accepted way of doing business at Continental Express. … By permitting deviations to occur on a continuing basis, senior management created a work environment in which a string of failures, such as occurred the night before the accident, became probable. Accordingly, their role must be considered causal in this accident.”

Lauber also expressed his concern that senior personnel responsible for maintenance did not understand that the leading edge of any airfoil is a critical component for which improper repair work could seriously compromise the safety of the aircraft.

As a result of this investigation the Safety Board issued four safety recommendations to the FAA to review the rules and practices regarding RIIs, advise pilots of critical maintenance actions, enhance surveillance of Continental Express, and emphasize inspection of equipment, procedures and quality assurance to evaluate the effectiveness of air carrier maintenance programs.

If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.” This quote is attributed to the late General George S. Patton — patriot, warrior and a general in the U.S. Army — who commanded the troops in World War II in France and Germany after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. A brilliant tactician and as indicative of the quote, was open to new ideas if something wasn’t working or a process could be done with greater efficiency. Unfortunately, it seems this is not the world we work in, especially when it applies to the government.

I put forth a possible NPRM earlier this year proposing to break the A&P license into an “unlimited rating” and a “limited rating”. The unlimited rating would be afforded those that have gone to an approved part 147 School. General aviation (GA) maintenance skills are continually deteriorating due to the loss of skilled technicians and the influx of new technicians that have only acquired the rating based on tactile time with no formal classroom training. The intent of the proposal was to provide ongoing and future safety margins for the general aviation fleet, in particular, because those individuals that are licensed on a “tactile hours”-based process are not necessarily qualified to work on light aircraft. Conversely, airline maintenance programs are structured and have oversight protection not available in GA part 91 operations. This disparity in the skills gap has grown substantially, specifically in the last five to ten years. I feel it is time for an evolutionary change to help maintain the thin safety margins that we now have.

In response to the NPRM proposal I put forth back in January (see Aviation Maintenance Winter 22/23 issue, page 38), a proposal to help enhance declining skill sets we are experiencing in aviation maintenance fields, the FAA has decided they have other, more pressing issues to deal with. These are the three reasons they cited:

1. The immediacy of the safety or security concerns you raise;

2. The priority of other issues the FAA must deal with; and

3. The resources the FAA has available to address these issues.

But all is not lost, I am so lucky to know that my comments and arguments for the proposed rule changes in my petition will be placed in a database. I am so lucky.

My proposal stressed that safety AND security could be greatly enhanced with absolutely NO cost to the consumer. All this with the stroke of a pen. Of course, the FAA is pretty busy trying to cover all the ATC errors causing close calls. May I point out that it was the skill set of at least one party in each of the recent events that prevented collisions. That party was not the FAA. They are also busy trying to get everyone on board with SMS. The Dynamic Regulatory upgrades have to be eating lots of time from various departments. And thank goodness the FAA has established the “Office of Investigations and Professional Responsibility.” Warm fuzziness all over. I can see why important issues like safety going forward isn’t on the plate.

I was just on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website. You have it bookmarked, right? Check out the breakdown of aircraft mechanic and service technicians. I could not find any references to skill and pay for anything OTHER than air transport related employments. Seriously? Who maintains the 200,000 General Aviation aircraft? The new part 147 rewrite is solidly aimed to benefit the transport sectors. No dope and fabric and welding. ATEC, which should be looking out for our interests in all aspects of our industry, is amazingly silent on anything outside of high end aviation. On the ATEC site, the Oliver Wyman link states that by 2027 demand for maintenance technicians will outstrip supply by 9%. That was the MRO 2017 survey and again, was only talking air transport. Extrapolate where we are now. In every magazine and website I read, all personnel and skill shortages are referenced to the air transport sectors. If you are an FBO and not affiliated with a major jet center, you tell me what you are seeing for skill sets.

I recently renewed my Inspection Authorization and I found out that due to processing backlogs I was number 400 on the list (last name starts with a Z). Really? There are more than 400 IAs in the state of Minnesota. Major jet centers are expanding across the country but lament the lack of talent that may not materialize with new ventures. COVID killed many smaller FBOs. How are we in aviation going to secure and train qualified warriors to guarantee the safety of our aging fleets? The NPRM I submitted put mentoring in the forefront to support that end. Technically, in Minnesota, we could have 400 IAs available for mentoring newly minted and aspiring technicians. A training force the FAA could never envision, but then again, everybody is thinking alike.

Carl Ziegler is an A&P and IA mechanic and can be reached at planemech@yahoo.com.

An aircraft is a collection of parts all destined to be replaced, and the cost to airlines of stocking spare for those parts can run into the millions of dollars. This is why many airlines (and other commercial operators) take part in ‘spare parts pooling’, to reduce the expense of keeping everything they need in inventory without compromising their ability to repair aircraft as needed.

“Pooling allows airlines to have instant access to components for their aircraft for quick turnaround times, resulting in less Aircraft on Ground (AOG) time,” said Christopher Solomon, general manager of Certified Aviation Services, an independent MRO.

Parts Pooling Primer

The concept of spare parts pooling — aka aircraft component pooling or contracted components pooling — is as simple as it is brilliant.

“Parts pooling is simply stockpiling aircraft components in one central location that are needed by different operators, for the purpose of sharing the reduced cost while ensuring quality and availability,” said Mike Cazaz. He is CEO of Werner Aero, which is an asset management and aftermarket supplier of logistical solutions to airlines, MROs, and aircraft leasing companies. “You take a bunch of parts, put them in a centralized location for ease in logistics and you sign up airlines to utilize these parts on an as-needed basis, for a fee.”

In exchange for that fee, companies such as Werner Aero serve as the parts collector, warehouse and distribution center. “A ‘pool provider’ such as ourselves is responsible for maintaining the pool level and dispatching the parts to the airline,” Cazaz said. “Let’s say an airline needs a generator. If they’re under contract with us, we will send them a generator that is certified and ready to be installed in the aircraft. In exchange, the airline will send us the ‘bad unit’ from the aircraft. We will manage the repair/overhaul of that unit and ensure that it goes into our pool for someone else.”

When trouble occurs, the parts provider is ready to help. “In the case of an AOG (Aircraft on Ground), an airline identifies the faulty component and directly reports it to its contracted components pool provider, usually by a web suite, phone or by email,” said Tobias Heiling, head of product sales for aircraft component services with the major MRO, Lufthansa Technik. “The provider then quickly checks its pool inventory for serviceable components of the required type and immediately starts the required logistics process — including customs clearance — for delivering this identical, ‘fresh’ and serviceable component from one of its pools to the location of the customer aircraft. There, it is installed as quickly as possible in order to get the aircraft airborne again.”

The pool manager doesn’t have to be a third-party provider. In some instances, “Two or more airlines agree on a requirement of candidate part numbers to stock at a common station,” said Dean Wood, president/CEO of Aviation Concepts, a supplier of aircraft replacement parts and inventory management services. “Rather than each airline allocating its own identical set of assets to this station, which would cause multiple sets of the same costly assets to be tied up, they agree that one airline will be the ‘Pool Provider’ at this station and the others will join the Pool Agreement, and share in the parts as needed.”

Lufthansa Technik is also a spare parts provider, and a very big one at that. “We operate one of the largest aircraft component pools in the world, with currently 2.3 billion U.S. dollars’ worth of components in our 15 worldwide component stocks on three continents,” Heiling said. “Sophisticated and flexible transport solutions provided through our own global logistics provider, Lufthansa Technik Logistik Services (LTLS), ensure that every component needed reaches our customers’ aircraft in the shortest possible time, if necessary even by an onboard courier booked on the next available flight. We moreover employ a dedicated AOG support team that is available 24/7 in order to provide assistance to our customers from the incoming call until their aircraft is finally back in the air.”

AAR Corporation (AAR) is another global MRO that manages a large spare parts pool that is linked to aircraft servicing, supporting about a thousand aircraft on average every day. “In its simplest form, airlines enter into long-term support agreements with pool and repair providers like AAR and the pool support comes bundled with a repair-by-the-hour arrangement,” said Chris Feddes, AAR’s senior vice president of commercial programs. This being said, the process is the same: “By entering into that arrangement an airline is effectively agreeing to use components that have operated on other airlines’ aircraft,” Feddes said. “They give you the unserviceable part, you repair it, put it back on your shelf, and ‘rinse and repeat’ that process a few thousand times a year for every customer.”

The Many Benefits of Parts Pooling

The practice of spare parts pooling offers a range of benefits to airlines and other aircraft operators.

“The first benefit is no capital expenditure on parts,” said Cazaz. “You don’t spend any money upfront. Someone has spent the money; belonging to the pool just costs you whatever the monthly fees are.”

Paying a known monthly fee rather than buying parts and storing parts directly, which can be an unpredictable expense in AOG situations, is the second big bonus. “Given that the monthly pool fee is fixed, airlines can better predict their operating costs,” Cazaz said. “And when you don’t have to spend money owning a large parts inventory, you can improve your cash flow as an airline.”

“Probably the single biggest thing they get is fixed predictable costs of component maintenance and pool access so they get typically a rate per hour for repair and a cost per month per aircraft, or maybe a rate per hour for pool access,” Feddes said. “So they have a high degree of certainty about what their costs are going to be every period. They typically realize lower long-term costs. By participating in a pool the operator benefits from the lower investment per aircraft that is needed to support a large fleet than you would get if you had a smaller fleet. You had to buy all of your own parts.”

This level of predictability makes it easier for airlines to plan and manage their maintenance budgets for the long-term, which is no small deal in an industry that is plagued by economic uncertainties; the most recent being COVID-19. This is why “Pooling is an integral part of many airlines’ asset management decisions,” said Wood. “There are many capital investments which can be avoided thanks to pooling, plus specific situations where airlines should not simply buy spares outright and add them to already inflated inventories. Pooling also controls today’s out-of-pocket expenses, does not directly affect the purchasing budget and takes many years to amortize or realize the full outright cost expenditure of parts (compared to buying and warehousing them outright).”

The fourth major benefit of parts pooling — and it could be argued that this one should be closer to the top of the list — is that pool providers have to manage the supply chain issues associated with finding, stocking, shipping and repairing parts, rather than the airlines themselves. Given the continuing chaos affecting the world’s supply chain in the wake of COVID, this is no small thing.

“As a pool provider, we manage the risk of the supply chain itself,” said Cazaz. “So if we guarantee turnaround time and there’s a problem with the supply chain, it’s up to us to perform for sure. The airline can count on the delivery time. If we guarantee that a part will be dispatched within 48 hours, they know that they don’t have to worry.”

“The risk of having the right component delivered to the right place at the right time is shifted from the airline to the supplier,” Heiling agreed. At the same time, a large spare parts pooling provider such as Lufthansa Technik can achieve “significant economies of scale by bundling the material stocks for numerous customers in a respective region.”

The Price of Admission

Clearly, spare parts pooling is a very smart move for cost-conscious airlines; that is to say all of them. Still, it does cost to join. So what is the actual price tag?

At Werner Aero, “the way it works is — in order to guarantee what we call a Service Performance Level — an airline has to sign up for a minimum of three years and pay a monthly fee to access the pool,” said Cazaz. “The fee is based on two main factors. The first is ‘how many parts am I guaranteeing the airlines per month?’ because this varies from customer to customer. The second is what we call ‘dispatch reliability’: what percentage of reliability, like 90% or 95%, do we have to guarantee dispatch of the parts within an agreed-upon window of time. Some airlines will say, ‘I’m okay with 90%,’ because the rate for 90% will be a bit cheaper than 95%.”

According to Aviation Concept’s Dean Wood, there are several parts pooling payment options to choose from. The longest-standing, most successful model is offered by “the International Airlines Technical Pool (IATP) with its 75-year history,” he said. “The IATP has a simplified process, contract and price structure for its member airlines to use. Basically the annual pool cost is 18% per year of the member-agreed pool value of the part(s). “This pool fee is split between the provider and sharers, so a pool being shared by three airlines only costs 6% per year for the airline to have access to the part, enabling it to avoid a potential AOG, flight delay or cancellation at that station.”

For airlines running on tight budgets, the temptation may exist to avoid the monthly fees of parts pooling by going it alone — ‘getting by’ using a minimal in-house parts inventory and buying what they need when an AOG occurs, with the accompanying amount of prayer required during the current chaotic supply chain situation. But succumbing to this temptation is just not worth the risk: in exchange for their monthly parts pooling fee, “the operator takes no long-term asset value risk on all that inventory. The pool provider takes that,” said Feddes. As well, “they wind up a significantly less complex supplier management operation. Typically, they’re managing just one supplier versus potentially hundreds, so they’ve really outsourced to the repair provider all of their repair cycle management obligations.”

In other words, there is a price of admission to belong to a parts pool. But the price of admission is worth it.

Here To Stay

One thing seems certain in the very uncertain world of aviation: the cost savings, supply guarantees and rapid AOG resolutions provided by spare parts pooling means that this approach to parts management is here to stay.

“At this point, I think pooling is now a permanent fixture of our industry,” Feddes said. “For most carriers, it’s proven itself to be the best way to provide component support to their fleets.”

“Parts pooling has been in the aviation industry for over 40 years,” noted Solomon.”Due to its convenience, we expect this aspect of the industry to continue to grow rapidly.”

A case in point: at Lufthansa Technik, “Total Component Support (TCS) is definitely among the most popular products in our portfolio,” Heiling said. “Today, we are supporting more than 140 airlines on almost all continents with these kinds of services. As many of our customers are seeking flexibility in recovering from the COVID crisis, while still keeping an eye on their cash situation, we expect the popularity of this product to gain further momentum.”

The popularity of this approach is now being driven by digitalization,” he added. “Data-driven digital maintenance platforms such as our AVIATAR can leverage significant benefits for component support offerings. On the one hand, their data analysis capabilities enable services such as Predictive Maintenance, thereby ‘detecting’ parts failures before they occur and initiating timely replacements. On the other hand, these prediction capabilities can also positively impact the parts pools by connecting automated stock optimizations and thus further cost reduction.”

Meanwhile, IATP maintains more than 7000 active parts pools,” said Wood. “The number of pools and items staged is fluid, as seasonal changes of stations served and fleet types fluctuate regularly, so do the spare parts requirements.” Intriguingly, the introduction of the newest generation of long-haul aircraft (i.e., the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787) into airline service is actually reducing the availability of spare parts for pools “due to the heavy reliance on Power-by-Hour (PBH) programs and OEM Gold Care programs for these fleets,” he said. “This tends to leave the airlines owning far less inventory of their own to provide for pooling. [Still], Opportunity does exist here for other suppliers to enter this space and establish pools to support airlines for items not covered or not covered well enough by their current PBH contracts.”

The bottom line: spare parts pooling is good for commercial aircraft operators, the MROs and pool providers who serve them, and the passengers who rely on them. It’s not often that a true ’win-win-win’ business case occurs these days, but this is one of them.

Companies that strive to meet highest standards and listen to customers are best positioned for safety and innovation.

Working at height is a hazardous job that can expose aviation maintenance professionals to unplanned falls resulting in severe injuries, such as fractured bones and head trauma, or even death. Falling is a top aviation maintenance error worldwide, and it is among the most common causes of serious work-related injuries and deaths, according to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

In fact, falls compose more than 20% of all workplace fatalities in the United States, with 850 workers across all industries — including but not limited to aviation — dying from falls, slips, or trips in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Injuries and fatalities from such incidents are relatively rare, perhaps lulling some workers into a false sense of security. OSHA has named fall protection as its most-cited violation each year since 2011.

Companies that design and manufacture aviation maintenance structures and equipment such as platforms, stands and ladders, where technicians work at height, are constantly improving and innovating their products in order to meet the needs of their customers while also meeting the industry’s ever-evolving safety regulations and consensus-based standards.

Standards and Customers Driving Improvements

In 2017, OSHA issued its final rule on Walking-Working Surfaces and Personal Fall Protection Systems under 29 CFR Part 1910 to better protect workers in aircraft maintenance and other industries from these hazards by updating and clarifying standards and adding training and inspection requirements.
Over the last decade, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) have also released many updates to the ANSI/ASSP Z359 Fall Protection and Fall Restraint Standards to address fall protection equipment and systems for climbing, work positioning, fall arrest, rescue, evacuation and other fall hazards. These consensus-based standards also address training, and how to identify and abate hazards to prevent injuries when working at height.
“Most of the advances in what we do come from changes in regulation or changes in consensus standards,” said Kevin Kelpe, continuing education manager at Diversified Fall Protection, a full-service fall protection integrator based in Ohio.

“For example, one of the updates to the OSHA 1910 standard that in recent years has had the biggest impact on companies designing and manufacturing lifts, platforms, work stands and scaffolding for aviation maintenance work performed at elevated heights, is the rule prohibiting workers from going within 15 feet (4.6 meters) of a leading edge in general industry workplaces where they are elevated 4 feet or more without using some kind of fall protection,” Kelpe said.

“In the environments that we’re talking about — aircraft maintenance — those workers are always exposed to falls,” he said. “There’s nowhere for them to stand where they not exposed to a hazard, according to OSHA,” he added, noting that most of what’s developed and designed to protect aviation maintenance workers are active systems, meaning they have to use a harness or a lanyard for fall protection.

The 1910 standard put forth requirements for the testing and certification or recertification of equipment both at the point of installation and later intervals; the training of authorized and competent individuals to use and train people on using the equipment; and the annual inspection of the equipment, as well as the inspection of certain types of equipment per each use.

“All those rewrites and changes related to training inspections, and to some degree fall protection equipment, really drove the development of new products for us,” Kelpe said.

The enhanced requirements are significant because before being codified in OSHA 1910, “these requirements weren’t always clearly articulated in the law,” explained Kelpe. “They’ve always been part of the consensus standard, but now they’re part of the law, which means if an OSHA inspector’s on a job site and doesn’t find a PPE (personal protective equipment) inspection log showing that the equipment was inspected at required intervals, not only can the inspector fine the employer but they also have the power to stop work,” he said.

Diversified Fall Protection regularly helps its customers implement evolving fall protection regulatory requirements to bring existing structures up to code, said Kelpe. For example, the company is currently helping customers incorporate new self-retracting lanyards (SRLs) into longer-span truss systems to comply with 2021 ANSI safety standard changes under Z359.14 for self-retracting devices (SRDs) used in personal fall arrest and rescue systems.

Since American and European regulatory requirements are widely considered to be the highest available safety standards for countries to aspire to, companies like Madrid-based Alufase, international manufacturer of aluminum aircraft maintenance platforms, will often fulfill regulatory requirements for a given country by using European standards or American standards to ensure the local region’s safety standard is exceeded, according to the company’s sales manager David Donado.

“Regulatory compliance is complex,” he said. “Aviation is one of the safest places to work, so you have to go with the highest standards or you are out. Even if you go to different countries and they have their own standards, they can usually accept European standards or American standards, depending on where they are, because those standards are more globally common, and this is something they will find as an understandable solution.”

Simpson Aerospace Services (SAS), an Indiana-based company providing aircraft maintenance stands for commercial and military aviation, recently has taken a different approach to fall protection with its latest maintenance stand used to install Wi-Fi and Satcom equipment on the top of narrow- and wide-body aircraft. Having gone from concept to market within the last 18 months, SAS’s new stand offers a number of innovations, including a completely enclosed working area, that eliminate the need for a worker to be tethered.

“We have engineered and are building stands that allow mechanics and tech crews to safely access the top of the plane and install, repair, or maintain those components, while giving them a safe, confident feeling and allowing them to work more efficiently. That cage, or work pen, also has metal shields preventing tools or equipment from falling, a common hazard that can result in damage to a fuselage, wing, or, worse still, someone on the ground,” said Bill Medley, SAS representative.

SAS relies heavily on customer input to guide its designs and ensure safety. “We worked with our customers and brought them in and had them actively give us feedback on the design,” said Medley. “For example, even the size of the step, the height of the step, and the broadness of the step. You think about people carrying things up the steps to get up to the aircraft, and there can be simple little injuries — things we kind of dismiss but they’re real. A slip on a step can cause a lot of damage to somebody and that’s what you don’t want,” he said.

“Airlines are looking for maximum utility with stands,” Medley said. “They want to be efficient because time on the ground is money, and airlines are sensitive to that. They know planes have to be maintained properly, but they also have to keep those aircraft in the air to make money.”

Kansas-based LockNClimb, which provides ergonomic ladders for MROs, is another company that views customer feedback as essential in designing the safest products for aviation mechanics who need to reach elevated areas. “Our ladders are developed with input from airline safety directors, management and mechanics. We take the prototypes onto the flight line, and the mechanics study them and tell us how we can improve them,” said president and CEO Jeff Green.

The company’s special-purpose ladders offer specialized safety features requested by mechanics that help prevent trips, slips and falls, including extra-wide treads and safety handrails. The ladders are also designed to ensure that the user is facing the work they’re doing instead of turning sideways, and also keeping their body inside of the rails of the ladder, per OSHA requirement.

Training for a Safety-First Culture

Maintenance technicians who don’t adhere to the highest safety standards when working at height risk not only fines and company reprimands, but also their own lives. Manufacturers can be a part of creating and encouraging a culture of safety in aviation for these workers.

“You’re putting men and women 30 feet up in the air, it’s dangerous work. Those of us who provide equipment to do that start with a position of safety first,” said Medley.

“We look at the standards and we want to be better than them,” he explained. “Whether that’s a grade of steel or aluminum, or whether it’s involved with a step or an angle, a lot of it is keeping people from doing things when they shouldn’t be doing them. Everything that’s on that stand is purposeful, not only for the function it’s doing, but also in what it won’t do.”

Training is more important than ever in light of aviation maintenance staffing shortages, according to Medley. “It’s very important that you can build a safe stand, but just as important is teaching how it works and how you use it,” he said.

“Most airlines, I’m sure, would tell you, there’s a tremendous change of staffing right now. All of our clients see a real need for more people, more technicians and trained people in this business, and that means an accelerated level or need for good training on all aspects of their job — and that includes safety,” Medley said.

In ensuring safe use of ladders or other platforms for maintenance workers, Green likewise emphasized the need for companies to have a training component as part of their services. “When our customers use our training videos in conjunction with the ladders, it drastically reduces falls and accidents,” he said. “In one company, we prevented 90% of their cost of ladder falls in one year just by using our training with the ladders.”

“It’s part of our responsibility to train people in a proper way that maybe they aren’t used to,” Donado said. “Regardless of country, if a company doesn’t have higher standards in terms of safety and they require trained people to use the equipment, we offer this to the customer and most of them appreciate it. It’s on us to get the people involved in this part of it, and create a safety-focused community, so we’re all safety first.”

When doing a cost-benefit analysis, most companies know they’re going to have to spend money to create a safe working environment, and they look to the law and the standard for the minimum level of safety, according to Kelpe. Yet, fall protection is still the number one safety violation 12 years running. “It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who works in safety wouldn’t know how common the violation issues are,” he said. “It goes to show you how common it is to meet the minimum requirement and stop spending money.”

Kelpe chalks it up to an opportunity to educate people, so they know that the minimum level of safety has been raised for fall protection standards. “Our services department works really hard keeping up with everyone’s inquires and calls asking to recertify equipment and train people. OSHA 1910 has been in effect since 2017 but now that citations are flying, people are trying to become compliant,” he said.

According to a recent ASSP survey, some of the top reasons for falls had to do with errors around using the equipment and being properly trained. “It’s not that companies don’t have fall protection programs in place, but people aren’t current on the standards, so they’re using the wrong equipment, or using the equipment wrong, or their manager isn’t training them. It’s something we have to be vigilant about — training and retraining and staying on top of it to prevent those things from happening,” he said.

“In our practice, we’re inclined to teach people the minimum and also teach them what we see as best practice for protecting workers and saving lives,” Kelpe concluded. “Everything tends to converge to the strictest standard, so we teach that, too. It’s alarming to think how catastrophic one accident can be.”

Borescope inspections are a routine but vital part of engine maintenance but combining with new technologies is opening up new opportunities. Ian Harbison reports.

Borescope inspections (BSI) are an essential but intrusive technique to establish the internal state of an engine. Given that they have to penetrate the outer case of the engine, Adam Mallion, senior business and project manager at OC Robotics, says borescope access points might be essential but they are complex and costly to engineer. While some engines have more than others, he expects future engines will have fewer, with the design emphasis being on finding the best location for the greatest access to the engine’s inner workings. These will not only be designed for BSI but will be to handle other tools for a variety of purposes.

OC Robotics

UK-based OC Robotics, which specializes in snake-arm robots, was acquired by GE Aerospace in 2017 after it became involved in the development of the HPT Blade Inspection Tool (BIT) for GEnx-1B engines on the Boeing 787 and GEnx-2B engines on the 747-8.

BIT is used for HPT Stage 1 and Stage 2 blade inspections. Unlike traditional borescopes, which use stereoscopic tips to generate a 3D map of the environment and require regular calibration, BIT uses a simple one-hand installation process, with fixed position cameras, to provide consistent, high-quality images of the blade and knowledge of the blade geometry to provide a simple measurement process. The images are processed using AI technology, which can be used to measure both lines and areas on blade surfaces, to make an accurate assessment of the condition of hardware.

A standard inspection can be carried out by one person (two for a standard BSI) in 45 minutes (up to 15 minutes more for BSI). A more detailed Significant Measurement Required can take up to 90 minutes (four hours for BSI).

The information can be exported to a USB or PC and is automatically uploaded to the GE cloud, creating a safe and secure backup of inspection data. The User Interface (UI), developed with airline inspector feedback, groups images together to reduce operator burden. Operators can flag blades of interest and add notes, which will appear in an automatically generated inspection report at the end of the inspection.

Ease of use is important for operators in harsh conditions, such as Africa, China and the Middle East, where high temperatures, dust and sand can adversely affect engines and so inspections tend to be more frequent. Mallion says the huge amounts of data generated by BIT inspections means that predictive maintenance techniques can now be utilized to refine the inspection intervals, and over time, the maintenance intervals, optimizing shop visits.

However, the company’s MiniX snake-arm robots are being developed to use the BSI access point for other purposes. These are self-supporting and can be precisely controlled to obtain access to other areas of the engine. Applications include cleaning, boroblending (minor repairs in situ) and reapplication of thermal coatings.

Dr. Jan Oke Peters, engineer technology development, explains, “I think it is safe to say that the engine OEMs learnt a lot from MRO experience gained over the decades with the predecessor ‘bread and butter’ models such as CFM56 and V2500. The latter model’s high-pressure compressor (HPC) proved especially tricky for borescope inspections as it only offers seven borescope inspection locations for ten stages, and only one borescope access point for the complete LPT (low-pressure turbine) module.”

He says that, in contrast, new generation engines such as the PW1000G and LEAP families have one borescope port for each HPC and LPT stage. This significantly improves accessibility for MROs, and moreover opens up the possibility to inspect both the leading and trailing edges of two successively positioned stages through a single port. In addition, the newer engine types feature an additional borescope port in the first stage of the high-pressure turbine (HPT) nozzle. This extra port greatly eases the inspection of the trailing edge of the Stage 1 HPT nozzle and the leading edge of the Stage 1 HPT blades. On older engine types, access to this complex location always required the use of a flexible borescope, which, in a complicated move, had to be inserted in the combustion chamber and between the airfoils of the HPT nozzle.

Lufthansa Technik

For Lufthansa Technik, the add-on technology was a 5G campus network in Hamburg, which started operations in 2020 in an engine workshop dedicated to CFM56 and V2500 overhauls.

Before that, borescope inspection (BSI) activities regularly comprised both routine/scheduled as well as unscheduled/on-condition inspections. The former category, for example, included all inspections mandated in an engine manufacturer’s maintenance schedule or Maintenance Planning Documents, as well as OEM Service Bulletins. The latter category for example includes post-bird-strike inspections or cases in which an engine experienced abnormal vibrations or a sudden drop in the exhaust gas temperature (EGT) margin.

In addition to that, the company performed inspections during every overhaul shop visit, both on incoming engines as well as on outgoing engines. Other noteworthy fields of activity comprised both off-wing and on-wing borescope inspections on leased engines, for example, during a transfer of ownership or from returns from lessee to lessor.

Of course, initial operations of the network coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. “Now aviation has left the ‘crisis mode’, current BSI activities are not that much different than before pandemic situation,” Peters says. “Except maybe in the aspect that, during the crisis, we significantly expanded our product offerings in the direction of Mobile Engine Services (MES), our term for smarter repair and lifespan-extending solutions. These can avoid or postpone major overhauls and can be carried out on-wing, on-site or in specialized repair shops. This segment still enjoys significant popularity and it is another interesting field in which we can put our comprehensive borescope expertise to good use.”

Michael Kirstein, vice president operations engine services at Lufthansa Technik, says: “Since the pandemic situation, virtual parts inspections and digital borescope inspections have clearly gained acceptance in our company. In fact, the Virtual Table Inspection (VTI) quickly advanced from a test project to a business-critical infrastructure, as travel restrictions prevented customers from travelling to inspect their engine parts. The 5G-based video streams have helped us enormously. In the past, such inspections often had to be planned several weeks in advance. Now we can schedule inspections at very short notice, which our customers really appreciate.”

In 2021, the 5G-powered VTI was fully integrated into the company’s AVIATAR Digital Operations Suite. Peters comments that this connectivity to digital technical operations and fleet management platforms is an important focus area in the further development of borescope equipment. A seamless connection to offerings such as AVIATAR can greatly improve the cooperation and interaction between the borescope inspector at one end, the engineering team in the middle, and the customer at the other end.

In his view, the quality and resolution of borescope imagery has constantly increased, and today’s state-of-the-art equipment already delivers a video quality that fulfills the requirements of many smart software tools and solutions utilizing technologies such as artificial intelligence or machine learning. The company is currently preparing the first such technique for entry-into-service in the coming months in line with tailored repairs within the MES portfolio.

From a pure application point of view, Peters can see a few development steps delivering further improvements to the entire borescope process. One very important driver emphasized by Peters is standardization. A consistent positioning of the sensor and camera, for example, could help to create more reproducible views that would significantly improve the reliability of the inspection results, even when performed at very different repair stations or locations. More standardized procedures could also help in the measurement of defects, providing more consistency, more accuracy and higher speed (shorter turnaround times), he believes.

Another trend he sees is the growing use of hardware and software to provide smart assistance for borescope inspectors. Here, for example, AI will definitely play an important role. Concerning flexible borescopes, upcoming development steps will presumably focus on aspects such as improved durability of the bending sections or improved articulation.

Finally, he says an additional focus area on the Lufthansa Technik development roadmap for borescope technology is the corresponding tool landscape. The aforementioned software tools supporting borescope inspections by utilizing AI for various (often niche) applications are only one example in this regard. Another good example is the development of special guidance or navigation tools (usually hardware but also software) that help improve the accuracy of the positioning of the sensor head in order to optimize the borescope’s view. Another tool which is under development aims at automatically turning the N1 spool during the inspection. This purposeful and target-oriented future development of the company’s borescope equipment and techniques, could probably even lead to the development of entirely new on-wing repair solutions for the MES portfolio.

Recently, the network was extended to a second workshop handling LEAP and CF6-80 engines. The company emphasises that customer decisions often involve six-digit cost figures, so the high resolution video and the stable, reliable and confidential 5G connection to the customer are essential. In fact, in one case, it demonstrated that scratch marks of just 0.3mm in length could be reliably identified.

One unusual aspect of the operation was the engine facility’s location on the edge of Hamburg Airport, so there were concerns about possible interference from the 5G network with aeronautical services, as has happened in the U. S. As it happens, the frequency band used by Lufthansa Technik is between 3.7 and 3.8 GHz. Compared with the public 5G band in the United States (3.7 to 3.98 GHz), the safety margin to the frequency band used by radar altimeters on commercial aircraft (4.2 to 4.4 GHz) is twice as large. In addition, Lufthansa Technik has so far employed 5G technology exclusively inside industrial buildings, which, with their high steel and concrete content, massively shield all wireless networks from the outside world.

MTU Maintenance

Within MTU Maintenance, borescope inspections, boroblend repairs as well as other on-wing or near-wing repair workscopes are performed by its ON-SITEPlus service teams, who can rapidly deploy to where they are needed from regional service centers in the USA, Germany, Canada, Brazil, Australia and China. If blade damage is detected and repairable, MTU can perform boroblending on CF34, CF6-80, CFM56, GE90, LEAP PW1100, PW2000, and V2500 engines.

MTU’s head of on-site services, Arne Straatmann, says, “Although MTU uses state of the art equipment and technology, the key element remains the skill and expertise of our inspector combined with the knowledge of our extensive network. In addition, it sometimes pays off when we perform BSI inspections that we have much more knowledge to judge any damage because we design, manufacture and repair airfoils, so we know the product in depth.”

Straatmann adds, “The ON-SITEPlus service team always try to keep an engine on wing if possible. We are always monitoring the latest digital technologies and indeed we are sure that AI-based applications will play a significant role going forward. This new technology actually enables us to reduce effort and time while at the same time even further increase quality. It is this consistent quality that enables MTU to be the only provider in Europe of OEM approved HPC boroblend repairs for the V2500 family.”

Aiir

Another company using AI is Amsterdam-based Aiir Innovations, which was formed in 2016 after the AFI KLM E&M engine shop in Amsterdam invited an assistant professor in Computer Vision and five graduates in Artificial Intelligence to see if they could develop a system to automatically analyze borescope video streams to identify faults such as cracks, scratches and dents. Bart Vredebregt, CEO and co‑founder of Aiir (and one of the students) says that initial results were promising but it took a few years to return to AFI KLM E&M with a viable product.

The Aiir software, which includes automated blade-counting, uses image analysis to very quickly generate a report — damage is flagged before the camera probe has even left the engine, while historical footage can be reviewed online. Video and other files are loaded on the company’s cloud-based platform and reviewed by the AI software. A detailed report then highlights any defects or damage detected. If further analysis is needed, comments can be left next to the relevant image. Other team members can see these immediately via the platform and offer their own evaluation. By generating a secure link, third parties can also access images and footage, eliminating the need to email large attachments or screenshots.

As well as AFI KLM E&M, users include Regional Jet Center in Amsterdam, which specializes in maintenance of Embraer E170, E190 and Lineage aircraft. The system was also trialled by easyJet in 2021.

It has also been incorporation into the Everest Mentor Visual iQ (MViQ) VideoProbe from Waygate Technologies, where it runs offline, while a further variant is Aiir Lite.

This is a standalone still image version of the analytic used by the Aiir Inspection software. The analytic was trained using more than a thousand hours of borescope footage from a wide variety of clean and dirty turbine engines including CF34, CF6, CFM56 5A/B/C, CFM56 7B, GE90, GEnx, LEAP, PW 1100, PW 2000, Trent 700, Trent 1000 and V2500. To enhance analytic robustness, images were captured from a multitude of incident angles and stand-off distances from the target component during historical borescope inspections.

It is available in two versions — Aiir Lite – Combustor and Aiir Lite – Rotate. The first covers the combustor, and sections of the high pressure turbine with Thermal Barrier Coatings, the second covers the high, intermediate, and low pressure compressor, intermediate, and low pressure turbine.

In a separate development, Aiir Innovations has been selected as one of eleven new startups to join the fourth cohort of Aerospace Xelerated. The program, led by industry partner Boeing in partnership with Tawazun Council, the defence and security acquisitions authority of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is supported by the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), GKN Aerospace and Etihad Airways.

The 11 startups, chosen from a pool of over 150 applications from around the world, will cover the program’s key focuses: Flight & Passenger Journey Optimization; Supply Chain Intelligence; Next Generation Workforce; and Operational Efficiency. They will benefit from a £100,000 investment from Boeing, with potential for additional funding from partners. Through Aerospace Xelerated, startups will be introduced to a network of angel investors, venture capitalists and key stakeholders amongst the aerospace industry, throughout the 12-week program. Successful companies will also get more than £100,000 in program benefits from partners including startup providers Oracle, Amazon, HubSpot, Digital Ocean and many more.

Eyes on the Inside

While there is optimism around technologies like AI, there also has to be some caution. One of the problems with AI is that many projects fail because they are ‘innovation for innovation’s sake’ and that they fail to take enough account of human involvement, especially when there is no associated legislation in place. As a result, while prototypes may be easy to create, they are difficult to get accepted by workshop personnel, who can see it as a threat to their jobs, being replaced by a machine.

In addition, in a safety critical environment like commercial aviation, it is important that there is complete confidence in the results. Numerous research projects have fooled AI visual recognition systems into misidentifying or, more importantly, missing vital details.

It is interesting to note that Waygate Technologies publishes an important caveat: “Analytic applications are intended to assist the user whilst performing in-situ visual inspections. Results will vary depending on your application. State-of-the-art analytic applications are generally not 100% accurate and this analytic is no different. Do not rely on this analytic to detect all indications.”

BSI is here to stay but its evolution will see connectivity, AI and colocation with other tools as the way forward.

AVM: Give our readers a bit of background about Schaeffler’s history and involvement in aerospace.

Duffy: Schaeffler Aerospace’s team lineage goes back to bearings used in the Spirit of St. Louis’ first trans-Atlantic crossing. Its predecessor companies’ manufacturing facilities are the famed Schweinfurt, Germany, bearing factory and the Danbury, Conn., factory which made the secret Norden Bombsight work. Today, whether it flies under water, in the air or in space, Schaeffler Aerospace has a dominant presence.

AVM: Focus in on the MRO work that Schaeffler does. What capabilities does your company have and when should maintenance professionals look to Schaeffler for help?

Duffy: Our primary focus is overhaul of main shaft power plant bearings which have the highest value in a jet engine. In addition, we work on high-value components associated with bearings such as planetary pinions or bevel pinions in helicopter transmissions. These associated components typically fit well within our capability of manufacturing rotating parts. Along with main shaft bearings, we routinely work on gearbox bearings such as upper tower shaft positions. If it is a bearing that flies, no matter what the value, we can at least do a relubrication or inspection with recertification. On lower-value items, while many are not able to compete with new part pricing, we can compete with lead times. Raw material lead times for aerospace precision bearings are currently 62 weeks with an additional 26-week manufacturing lead time. An inspection and recertification are typically less than seven calendar days, while an overhaul is typically less than three weeks.

AVM: Schaeffler is well-known for bearing work — talk about what makes your services in this area unique and standout.

Duffy: I think there are several reasons. First, our global footprint allows us to service our customers in the region for the region. Secondly, Schaeffler and its predecessor aerospace companies are known for engineering solutions where the OEM has a problem. We aggressively seek to develop material processes and combine those with our other technologies to bring those solutions to market. One example would be the combination of plasma nitriding with silicon nitride rolling elements. Another would be Schaeffler’s proprietary Cronidur 30 material. Our global aerospace network can bring our technology to market and upgrade existing componentry where the customer needs it. We are not a low-cost provider nor merely a commodity supplier. Finally, we think all customers are important. We do not have A, B or C customers. We try to work with everyone where a solid business case exists.

AVM: Give our readers some specifics on how you analyze and diagnose components when they come to you.

Duffy: We do it from two sides. On the OE side of the business, in support of our customers testing for new product, our engineering teams do a comprehensive evaluation and propose changes to enhance durability and life. On the MRO side, some of what we do is statutory. Inspection for hidden damage, handling damage and shipping damage are part of the regulatory requirement. Going beyond that, of course we apply the approved or accepted technical data, but with our vast bearing experience, we can apply our latent knowledge to further enhance serviceably. And finally, we apply our tests developed over the years, such as noise testing or torque testing, to further ensure bearing serviceability.

AVM: Schaeffler does work for both the civilian market and military communities. Where possible, give some examples of work that the company does in both markets.

Duffy: It is really the same business; however, it may be limited to a given region. For commercial work, our global repair station network can handle all that work. We will “storefront” where a particular location does not have a qualification or inventory and internally send work to our network where that qualification/inventory exists, while still meeting turn times. An example would be the CFM56 series engines or the Geared Turbo Fan (GTF) series of engines. We still must follow export controls. In some cases, on the commercial side, we can support a replacement or surplus option where we procure our bearings, overhaul them, and make them available to the market. On the military side, export controls and international trafficking of arms regulations limit us to keeping that business within one of our organizational regions. For example, with the F119 engine which goes on the F-22 Raptor, these bearings and components are only manufactured and serviced in North America. In some of these instances, we may have a performance-based logistics solution in place where we guarantee a monthly volume of repairs with a surge capacity.

AVM: Supply chain woes continue to haunt aerospace. How is Schaeffler able to help operators and MROs during this time of supply chain challenges?

Duffy: Schaeffler does face similar challenges with the supply chain; however, Schaeffler decided early on in the pandemic to maintain a high raw material inventory and keep staffing levels at pre-pandemic levels to help insulate our business form some of the possible and now occurring disruptions in the supply chain. Of course, as time marches on, that inventory has been drawn down, and with a 62-week raw material lead time, we are having to look out ahead several years for purchases. In addition, while not always price competitive, the MRO option helps our customer base keep going.

AVM: Talk about market demand — what are you seeing in this area and how is Schaeffler responding?

Duffy: Up, up and away. In our Americas region, the pandemic had little impact on our MRO business and our OE business remained strong. 2022 was an extremely strong year in the Americas with our repair stations performing substantially above budgeted sales and at times straining our turnaround. In fact, growth in the Americas did not seem to be impacted by the pandemic. Globally, 2022 started to see the wide-body market return to some level of normalcy and our European market closed close to pre-pandemic levels. Our challenge now is getting the raw material, human capital, and equipment to service this extremely strong demand, while maintaining efficiency.

AVM: Does Schaeffler have new programs that our readers should be aware of?

Duffy: We are always working on future projects with OEM’s but regrettably, because of two-way nondisclosure agreements, I can’t name names or mention specifics other than to say the projects cover fixed wing and rotary wing applications, including EV technologies. These are both of a commercial and military nature. On relatively new programs like the Pratt & Whitney GTF series, we have very strong participation with both IAE LLC and Pratt & Whitney as the primary OE of the main shaft bearings and 100% of the bearing MRO business on all makes and models of the GTF program. This participation has allowed us to start reaching beyond bearings and actively bid on non-bearing components. We are diligently working with GE on their portion of the LEAP-X program and we were the first MRO supplier for the GENx engine that is dominant on the B787.

AVM: Talk about how your company can work in very diverse areas including wide-body and narrow-body, civilian and military, fixed wing and rotor areas. How does Schaeffler manage that?

Duffy: Our global footprint allows us to have some specialization in the regions. An example of this would be in the Americas region with two manufacturing locations, each with a licensed MRO facility within them. One location focuses on larger or high-thrust commercial and military engine bearings. The other facility focuses on smaller power plant components, auxiliaries, gearboxes, and miniature/instrument product. On the MRO side, one facility focuses on large main shaft bearings with licensed OEM repairs. Meanwhile, the other facility focuses on lower-value bearings like in a helicopter transmission, smaller power plants with a lower level of repair, and non-OEM repairs. This facility also processes high volumes (over 1000 per month compared to 200) of parts per month.

AVM: What changes are you all seeing in the regulatory environment? Are things improving or getting more difficult? What can the regulators do to improve the regulatory environment?

Duffy: Improving as we move towards more bilateral agreements. It has improved both understanding and costing. For us, the CAAS in Singapore now covers for the FAA in the U. S. Instead of paying for an inspector to do oversight from the FAA IFO in Los Angeles, the local authority does that oversight. While relations may currently be tense with China, as the Chinese regulatory environment matures, developing more bilateral agreements will further smooth the process. The CAAC has an agreement in place with the CAAS in Singapore, so like the FAA, the CAAC will be covered by the local civil authority. With the exit of Great Britain from the EU, bilateral agreements will be developed to cover business across the globe and help minimize the impact of the change.

AVM: Schaeffler invests in research and development in many areas. Talk about the company’s commitment to R&D. Share some ideas that have been brought to life from your R&D efforts.

Duffy: Schaeffler is a firm believer in R&D across all the markets it participates in and some of those technologies can work in several markets at the same time. In the past, examples as I have given include Cronidur 30 material, M50NiL material, plasma nitriding and using silicone nitride rolling elements in conjunction with nitride surfaces.

AVM: Electric vehicles are becoming a reality, even in aviation. Is Schaeffler getting involved in this area? What insights can you share about that?

Duffy: As you may have read, Schaeffler has a strong commitment to the EV market given that sustainability is one of the company’s core values. Often, this technology is developed for the automotive portion of the business, and then scaled up to meet the demands of aerospace. An example would be an EV booster system used on a police interceptor. While not on the market yet, you certainly could take that technology and use it on a powerplant for an aircraft for boosting during critical portions of flight such as takeoff or landing. About drones, we already are supplying OEMs that make small EVs for aerospace. Schaeffler’s commitment is further exemplified by acquisitions that would support the EV marketplace.

Christopher Duffy is the director of strategy and business development at Schaeffler Aerospace where he is responsible for the growth and support of the aerospace bearing repair and overhaul business with locations around the world. He has matrix management responsibility for the global repair station network including expansion and addition of new locations. In addition, he is responsible for establishing and maintaining the aerospace MRO and new parts strategy.