How Willis Lease Is Leveraging Assets To Grow MRO

Caroline Vandedrinck joined Willis Lease Finance Corp. in 2024 as senior vice president for materials and services after eight years at SR Technics. She spoke with Lee Ann Shay, executive editor for MRO and business aviation, about Willis’ goals.

What drove Willis Lease into MRO? The services business is very important to Willis Lease Finance Corp. The core business is engine leasing. When you have assets going in and out of airlines, you need MRO services. Assets need checks when they transition between leases. Big MROs don’t like to do these little checks—they’d rather do the big checks. So we started our own MRO for engines.

But when engines come into the shop isn’t predictable: Airlines can extend leases, so there’s no ebb and flow of work coming in. That led us to start third-party services, which is an important part of our engine MRO. We also offer airframe maintenance to support aircraft that we lease. We opened a hangar at Teesside Airport [in England], where we perform C checks on our own airplanes as well as those for third parties.

If the airframe is at its end of life, we can tear it down and harvest the top 500-1,000 parts.

Then we have the consulting business, a [continuing airworthiness management organization] to support airlines and our material business, which takes parts from teardowns and then repairs and sells them.

Initially, all of the services were to support our own demands, but that grew into third-party services as well.

How is your engine hospital shop business? How many of the visits are for third parties? We are going to grow engine hospital visits in Coconut Creek, Florida, and in Bridgend, Wales, where we also offer engine teardowns and storage.

Regarding the business split, it depends on the day of the month. If we have a lot of lease returns, then we’ll do more Willis engines. But other days, it’s mostly third-party engines.

The demand for those shorter visits surged a few years ago to minimize engine costs. Are you expecting the high demand for those to continue? There’s a high demand for hospital-type shop visits. But I know big overhauls are finally coming to roost for the big MROs. However, those hospital shop visits aren’t going away because operators became used to those quicker, less expensive, shorter workscope visits.

And in between, there are now “heavy hospital visits.” A light hospital visit is when you make minor repairs, such as top-case repairs. But because the CFM engine is so modular, you can do much more without having to complete a full overhaul. You can change modules. You can destack a low-pressure turbine and inspect the parts and maybe put in a few new or repaired parts, then put it all back together. That, to me, is not a light shop visit. Those are heavy hospital shop visits and require a test cell.

Parts shortages in the industry are creating shop bottlenecks. How do the maintenance and parts businesses work together? Having a material business definitely helps our engine centers because they don’t have to take time finding parts. Our material organization is our parts purchasing arm. They buy teardown engines, put the parts through the repair cycle and make them available to us.

Charles Willis stated at AeroEngines Americas that he wants the maintenance business to expand to 50% of the company’s overall revenue. How will this happen? We’re always exploring growth vertically and horizontally. As Charlie Willis would say, “We are a one-stop shop.” If an airline has an aircraft or a fleet of aircraft, we can buy them until the airline gets its [Airbus A320neo] or [Boeing] 737 MAX and not worry about the lease return conditions. We can put engines in the pool if there’s life left. If an aircraft has life left, we can lease it. If not, we can tear it down and put it through the material organization. So airlines can lease an engine or whole asset from us, and then we put it through its life cycle. It’s the whole life-cycle approach that will grow the business.

Speaking of life cycles, retirements have been slow for the popular narrowbody engines. When do you expect to see more engine teardowns? I think there’s a direct correlation when Airbus and Boeing delivering the Neos and MAXs and when those [International Aero Engines] V2500s and [CFM International] CFM56 engines end their life. For each Neo delivery, there could be a teardown down the line. It probably will take Airbus and Boeing a couple more years to get back to their normal rhythm of deliveries.