North American Carriers Pivot To Future-Focused MRO Planning

CALGARY—Tight MRO capacity in North America is driving some operators to turn to alternate solutions for airframe and engine maintenance. During the recent CAPA Airline Leader Summit Americas in Calgary, Sun Country Airlines and AAR Corp. discussed how maintenance and supply chain trends are changing in the region.

“Most operators would probably have a hard time finding a slot in North America in the next 12 months—it’s that tight,” said Troy Jonas, VP of commercial, repair and engineering at AAR. He notes that the MRO provider’s customers are starting to look much further out when planning maintenance. “We’ve had customers that have locked in our capacity for 7-8 or more years, and that is quite a departure from pre-COVID when 12 months would’ve been a long time frame.”

A couple years ago, Sun Country typically booked maintenance capacity around nine months into the future, according to Peter Schumann, director of maintenance planning and MRO. “Since that time, it’s really tightened up,” he said, noting that airlines are now competing for tier one slots.

As a result, Schumann’s team is “working into multi-year agreements with some of our tier one vendors” and “planning out our heavy maintenance visits all the way into the 2030s to get as far ahead of it as we possibly can, and keeping the dialogue open with our MRO partners and the whole community to make sure that, when it comes due, these aircraft have a home and nobody’s going to be left out in the cold.”

One way in which some North American airlines have alleviated this capacity crunch is to send aircraft to MRO providers in Latin America—which Schumann suggested could be behind some slots beginning to open back up in North America: “[Latin American MRO providers] have done such an excellent job in their MRO capabilities—their pipeline, labor streams and everything like that—that now when cuts are starting to be made and the relief valves are starting to open up a little bit further, the airlines could probably say, ‘We’re going to scale down in the U.S. before we scale down in Latin America.’”

Meanwhile, another factor clogging up maintenance capacity is the extended turnaround times caused by supply chain issues. Jonas said a shortage of Airbus materials in North America is impacting heavy maintenance checks in the region, while a shortage of OEM material and spares is tying up engine MRO slots.

“You get the engine into the overhaul process and you find these parts that need to be replaced, and the OEMs can’t supply it,” he said. “The problem is so acute that the operators and even the engine shops are reluctant to put an engine into the shop and start tearing it down until you have a good line of sight on the material that you’re probably going to need.”

Jonas said this challenge is causing operators to plan for engine overhaul and repair events months in advance, actively procuring the material they think they may need and working with engine shops to agree on whether and when to place an engine into the maintenance pipeline. “If you have all those parts, you can probably get a 120-day cycle time for an overhaul. If you don’t, it’ll go in and get tied up in the shop, sit there for months and just gum up the works [even] worse,” he said. “A corollary to that shortage of OEM spares is that the operators are much more willing to go the route of used serviceable material.”

As a Boeing 737NG operator, Schumann said Sun Country now struggles with receiving OEM support for part failures that occur with an aging airframe. “What we end up having to do is a lot of fabrication with MROs,” he added. For instance, Schumann cited plenums on heat exchangers as one type of component the airline is struggling to get.

“We’re all going into summer and older 737s can get quite hot. Their air conditioning systems are starting to age and break down, and not only can we not get the off units back from the repair shop in time to meet the MRO forecast while also trying to support the line when we’ve got pilots that are refusing airplanes because the cabin’s too hot, but the OEMs can’t keep up with the demand that us and [other 737NG carriers in the U.S.] need,” he said. As a result, Sun Country has needed to be “very novel in in situ cleaning and troubleshooting,” he added.