Intelligence: News

With the inauguration of the A380 maintenance hangar at its central maintenance facility in Frankfurt, Lufthansa Technik said it is ideally equipped to provide technical support for the Lufthansa fleet’s future flagship and all other wide-body aircraft. "The size of the A380 exceeds the dimensions of any other aircraft so far. Now, with the new hangar, we have the required capacities at our disposal," said August Henningsen, chairman of the executive board of Lufthansa Technik, at the recent opening ceremony.

Now that the first phase of construction has been completed, two Airbus A380s or three Boeing 747s can be maintained simultaneously on the hangar’s more than 269,000-square-foot ground plan. The entire hangar system is fully accessible to traffic, with more than 775,000 square feet of apron, taxiways and parking positions. The second phase of construction, to be completed by 2015, will provide the capacity for simultaneous maintenance work on four A380s, thus becoming the largest aircraft hangar in Europe. The capital expenditure amounts to roughly $237 million.

The A380 hangar will be put to use immediately — a year and a half before Lufthansa commences operations with the A380 — to handle the docking times for maintenance of Lufthansa’s long-haul fleet. With the A380 hangar, Lufthansa Technik is gaining urgently needed additional capacity in Frankfurt, according to the company, as the Lufthansa Group expands its fleet.

Lufthansa Technik keeps maintenance stations for checking customer aircraft at every major airport in Germany and at about 50 other locations around the world. The hub of Lufthansa Technik’s line maintenance activities is Frankfurt airport. All the line maintenance centers around the world are controlled from there.

The maintenance area in Frankfurt, with its three large halls and the hangar belonging to Lufthansa Technik subsidiary Condor Cargo Technik, has a staff of almost 3,500 and is positioned to provide technical support 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Other maintenance centers in Germany are in Munich, Berlin, Duesseldorf, Hamburg and Stuttgart.

BAE Systems Regional Aircraft Repositions MRO Services for Long-term

In a major new plan, BAE Systems Regional Aircraft has repositioned itself for the long-term with a number of changes and rearrangements to its MRO services. In particular these cover the arrangements for aircraft spares, their ownership and distribution.

The current business provides spares support for some 800 aircraft worldwide and represents an annual turnover of $150 million. It provides a continuing spares sales and AOG service operated from the company base at Prestwick, Scotland and with warehousing and logistics services operated from the Weybridge, Surrey, logistics center. There is also a growing e-business with spares selling on the Web.

With the changing nature of the Jetstream 31/32 market with numbers of these aircraft in servicing diminishing, an outside company, Saywell International, was appointed sole distributor of spares for the models from February 2008. The Herndon, Virginia satellite warehouse serving the Americas was closed in mid-2007. Saywell International has facilities in Worthing, UK and Florida, USA. Currently, there are some 90 operators of the Jetstream 31/32 models, which Saywell will now serve.

Separately, a long-term collaboration deal has been made with Ansett Aircraft Spares & Services, under which the one-time Australian company will relocate from its operational and spares center at Heathrow Airport, UK to BAE’s Logistics Centre at Weybridge. With this move, Ansett has also purchased a substantial quantity of surplus BAe 146/Avro RJ spares from BAE Regional to add to its existing inventory and which, in the words of Greg Quinlan, president and CEO of Ansett, will greatly enhance the company’s product line for this aircraft series. The Ansett Spares company was established in 1958 as a support organization, taking the name of the Australian airline of which it was once a part, and supports all of the major aircraft manufacturers, including Boeing, Bombardier and Airbus. Under the agreement Ansett, will lease office and warehouse space from BAE Systems in a four-year deal.

BAE Systems Regional Aircraft continues to profit from its Spares-by-the-Hour support program, winning, in the last few days of 2007, a contract to support all 23 Avro RJ85 aircraft in the fleet of CityJet, the Ireland-based subsidiary of Air France. This contract is for three years. During 2007, BAE Regional gained new business worth $75 million in the Spares-by-the-Hour field, including contracts from Titan Airways of the UK and Blue 1 of Finland, covering both 146 and RJ aircraft. New leasing business was gained from Quest of Mexicana, South African Airlink and MDLR of India. Every new jet leasing portfolio customer in the year contracted for the JetSpares Support program.

BAE Systems, the parent group of BAE Regional, has 96,000 employees worldwide, and an annual turnover of $30 billion. — By Roy Allen

ATR Plans New -600

Toulouse, France-based ATR (Avions de Transport Régional) announced their next generation ATR 42/72 turboprop regional airliner. The ATR 42/72-600 was officially launched in October and will be available for entry into service in 2010.

There are some changes to ATR’s overall maintenance program that are being developed on an on-going basis for the current -500 model that will be applicable to the -600 when it begins coming off the line, according to John Moore, senior VP, commercial.

One recent innovation that will be standard in the -600 and is now currently available to be retrofitted into the -500s is the multi-purpose computer (MPC). This is a device that is able to gather a significant amount of in-flight information coming from the different systems of the aircraft, recording different parameters and data "so that at any given time the pilots can download or access data after a squawk or anomaly. That information can also be sent to the mechanics ahead of time or downloaded upon arrival so that (maintenance personnel) can very quickly access data directly from the operation of the aircraft for quick analysis and troubleshooting," he said.

Moore added that ATR is currently working with a software provider to develop software "to assist in maintenance planning and preparation for maintenance tasks."

The -600 model will also have the capability for an in-flight entertainment system, requiring some additional maintenance planning for the aircraft’s cabin. According to ATR, this will be the first time an entertainment system is available in a regional aircraft.

The biggest change in maintenance requirements will be in the cockpit, "where there will certainly be a need for additional test equipment and maintenance tooling," Moore said.

As noted, the -600 cockpit will be fully digital, while previous ATR models were analogue. The new avionics package is provided by Thales, also based in Toulouse.

The avionics package consists of five LCD multi-function display screens, two on each side with a central display "that provides engine and other warning type information," Moore said. Standard equipment includes a flight management system, state-of-the-art communication and navigation systems that include GNSS/WAAS capability ready for low RNP and the MPC "to further enhance flight safety and operational capabilities.

"The cockpit will come with a fairly standard package, which has always been our philosophy," Moore said. "This simplifies things for the operators and is better for the investors and financiers not have a gazillion different versions of the aircraft out there. There will, of course, be certain upgrades and additional capabilities, such as Cat. III. But if an operator doesn’t need that, he is not going to want to pay for it."

Additional options for the new -600 include additional read-out capabilities on the MPC, a new autopilot with Cat. IIIA approach capability and/or electronic flight bags (EFBs). The aircraft will also be fully certified for ADS-B operations, with the operators deciding what level they want to go into.

"This will be by far the most advanced cockpit and instrumentation that is available today in the regional industry because we are benefiting from a lot of what (Thales) has done for the A380 program," Moore said.

The new Thales digital cockpit is expected to provide a 10-15 percent reduction in maintenance costs compared to the analogue systems in the earlier ATR models, as well as provide an improvement in terms of failure rate, time between renewals and reliability of the components, he said. "Strictly from a maintenance standpoint, it will reduce maintenance costs and increase access to information to facilitate maintenance and reliability."

The ATR 42/72-600 will also have the new Pratt & Whitney PW127M engine to improve performance in hot and high conditions. This engine is beginning to be installed in the -500, and will be standard in the -600. It is essentially the same engine as the PW127F that currently powers the earlier models, but provides 5 percent additional power on an "as-needed" basis. The additional power is controlled by the pilots in the cockpit based on operational needs for each flight.

"There is a data gathering device in the engine that keeps track of how many hours and cycles that [the engine] is operated as an M or an F, and the engine will know at which level it is being operated at any given time," Moore said. "It’s a way to get additional power without paying the full cost of it, yet keeping the same engine for all the operators. There will be a bit higher temperatures, a little bit more wear and tear when it is operated at the 5 percent additional power level."

When used in the "M" mode, the new engine will give the ATR 42/72-600 a take-off/landing weight of 50,706 pounds, an increase of about 1,100 pounds. It will also give the pilots an additional 1,000 foot one-engine-out net ceiling improvement. When not needed, the engines can be operated at lower power settings to reduce engine maintenance costs.

The costs of the new Thales glass-cockpit plus improved P&W 127M engine will add about $700,000 to the cost of today’s -500, putting the next generation ATR 42/72-600 at around $19 million in 2007 dollars, Moore said. — By Douglas Nelms