Aircraft Maintenance – Airline Checks

Background

Our customer is one of Europe’s leading commercial airlines with a fleet of over 200 aircraft. Each aircraft must undergo maintenance checks at regular time and mileage intervals.

Challenge

Like all airlines, our customer has rigorous and robust processes for planning, managing and assuring the maintenance of its fleet, thus ensuring fitness for use whilst minimizing time on the ground (not generating revenue).

The sparse availability of skilled technical labour to complete maintenance tasks has been a challenge in the sector for many years and remains a genuine risk to their commercial objectives. They are therefore constantly looking at new ways to attract, retain and deploy aircraft technicians and engineers.

Solution

Specifically, we manage a team of 25 aircraft engineers at London Heathrow providing 7 days per week coverage. We manage the station as a package of work (under clients Part 145) ensuring priority defects are cleared within the timescale

Our fixed daily charge is outcome-based and tied to the successful handover of aircraft back into service. We can respond to additional demand by increasing our engineering teams at short notice. Our gain share model is attractive to our skilled workforce because they receive higher remuneration in return for higher productivity targets/KPIs and receive fixed earnings irrespective of how much of their shift they work.

Outcome

In the first 6 months, we demonstrated through a shift in accountability, that we could drive our engineering teams to not only complete all tasks in the allocated time but also identify and remedy additional defects. We have since expanded the contract to include additional aircraft and tasking.