Industry Insight Special Report
Digtal era demands smarter, faster MRO
Airline maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) is no longer a business of grease and toil. The hangar of the future will be abuzz with drones identifying MRO work minutes after a plane’s arrival at a facility. Providers who do not offer these sophisticated MRO solutions risk losing business, reports chief correspondent Tom Ballantyne.
October 1st 2017
U-Tapao airport, 140 kilometres southeast of Bangkok, was not born in the digital age. Read More » Constructed jointly with the U.S. Air Force more than 50 years ago to support military action in the Vietnam War, the huge site languished almost unused for decades until 2014 when the Thai government legally transformed the facility and its adjacent vacant land into a joint civil-military airport.
Since then plans for U-Tapeo to be the centerpiece of US$5.7 billion project for MRO designed for the airlines of the 21st century have accelerated.
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In the world of airline MRO, THAI is not alone in planning for the digital future of the MRO industry. Across the region, airline and independent MROs are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new technologies at their facilities and adopting The Cloud and Big Data to fundamentally restructure MRO fleet management. They are installing systems that predict the time of parts replacement and using robots to carry out repairs.
In the Oliver Wyman 2017-2027 Fleet & MRO Forecast, the authors said the world’s in-service commercial airline fleet will be 35,000 airplanes by 2027.
In ten years, 58% of the global fleet will be new generation aircraft. Commercial airline MRO growth is forecast to achieve a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.8% for the next decade, from $75.6 billion now to just over $109 billion a year in 2027. The major growth engine for MRO in these years will be Asia, especially China and India where the region will almost double its in-service fleet and related MRO business.
Asia-Pacific MRO will expand at a healthy 4.4% annually. China will be the standout market with its forecast MRO growth to be 10.1% a year and its market size predicted to grow more than 160%, the largest net growth in the world.
The region’s airline expansion brings with it numerous challenges for MRO, which can only be solved with enhanced IT implementation in the hangar. Statistics reveal maintenance delays and unexpected downtime costs the airline industry an estimated $8 billion a year.
RUSADA, a U.S.-based aviation maintenance and engineering software company with offices in India, Singapore and Australia, said in a recent report that airlines would demand greater aircraft availability from MROs. Regulators, too, would enforce stricter compliance of MRO standards.
Present legacy systems or in-house solutions may not be fit-for-purpose to manage growth while the cost of maintaining these systems may be cost prohibitive, the company said.
Another software provider, Ottowa-based Mxi Technologies, said: “In this atmosphere of change and evolution, Cloud computing represents a significant technology that has the potential to transform the world of aviation MRO.
Industry insiders point out that today’s components are precision crafted to tight tolerances, using high performance materials and additive manufacturing techniques. These components not only require rapid and exact inspection results to maintain safe and reliable aircraft operations, they demand new methods of inspection.
The top three advancements in the industry are three-dimensional (3-D) computed topography (CT), new visual inspection bore scopes and connected mobile, user-interfaces that appeal to the next generation of industry inspectors.
Aircraft designed and built after 2000 require technology that accommodates the new construction materials of carbon fiber composites, hybrid alloys, and special coatings as well as new data collection and measurement tools for advanced prognostication capability.
Properly harnessed, the capability for maintenance organizations to take action before a component fails promises to improve reliability and reduce costs. The challenge is that there are not yet proven systems to accept and analyze the data for proactive decision-making, the company said.
“From an airframe MRO perspective, providers must be able to handle the new composite and metal matrix materials dominant in the newest-generation aircraft, such as the B787 and A350. The newer technology includes much more sophisticated avionics and systems that are able to interface with health monitoring systems, designed to recognize pending system or component failures. This ‘Big Data’ capture and processing will require a clear strategy to take full advantage of its potential.
In this new era, component MROs must have the capital to invest in testing equipment and licenses to access OEM manuals and data for new parts. Line maintenance providers will experience challenges in training and use of the new aircraft health monitoring systems, fault isolation systems and software configuration protocols.
In another segment of the market, it is universally agreed that OEMs will continue to increase their share of the aftermarket using shrewd strategies that have proved successful to date. It is a shift that squeezes the independent MRO sector, particularly the smaller ones.
The Oliver Wyman forecast cautioned that advanced analytics and game-changing technologies remain elusive for many in the aftermarket, with only 20% of respondents to a survey seeing a material impact from these technologies on their businesses.
“Participating executives described their industry as constrained by old IT systems (62%) that lack functionality and flexibility and are often not compliant with changing regulations.” Given the looming labor shortage and failure to upgrade technology, Oliver Wyman sees the prospect for rising maintenance costs and an increase in turnaround times (TAT) for scheduled maintenance ahead. In response, airlines are likely to retain more spare aircraft as a backup for potential servicing delays.
The Oliver Wyman forecast highlighted another trend. “Airlines around the world are sending nearly 30% of wide body heavy airframe maintenance work to the Asia Pacific. There will be an inflection point when capacity growth within Asia cannot keep pace with the MRO demand of its own countries and also foreign airlines. Operators will have to look elsewhere for their MRO needs. Notwithstanding the potential, capturing market share will not be simple,” it said.
“Even when labor rate parity is reached, Asian MROs have demonstrated the capacity and skills to secure long-term contracts. While MROs in developing regions have wide-body capability, investment in facilities, equipment, tooling and training is essential. Paying the cost of capital for expansion will be necessary to compete.”
At GE’s Digital Investor Day last year, Kevin McAllister, then head of GE’s Aviation Services unit but now running Boeing Commercial Airplanes, said GE has 35,000 engines feeding data from 100 million flights per year into its internally developed Predix platform, which GE Aviation moved onto last year. The data is analyzed and alerts issued if warranted. Predix’s analytics capabilities have helped increase the number of total alerts and decrease the percentage of nuisance alerts, or false positives. McAllister offered real-world examples of the impact analytics are having on the bottom lines of airlines, and by extension GE. One airline had 12 CF34 engines on six regional jets with abnormally high combustor baffle “distress”. GE’s data scientists linked the affected aircraft to short-haul routes with low-cruise altitudes, which lead to higher internal engine temperatures. “It allowed us to isolate the maintenance actions to only six airplanes in the fleet,” McAllister said. “This is a great opportunity to get down to actions by individual engine in a world of variation.” Another case involved a high-pressure turbine shroud wear problem showing up on some Boeing B777s. “In the old world, when you saw distress like that, you would begin to pull engines across the fleet,” McAllister said. But analytics can quickly tie specific flight profiles to airframes, providing context that leads to insight. “You have to be able to segment variation-of-fleet so you can get down to actions by airline and by engine,” he said. In the B777 shroud case, GE modified maintenance procedures for engines regularly exposed to the harsh conditions. “We have eliminated on-wing inspection for this condition out in the fleet. If you know how distress is accumulating by engine, by part, you can work scope these engines on-wing. You can begin to design what you want to do when the engine comes off,” GE said. |
