CHICAGO—Sun Country Airlines is working to boost the efficiency of its maintenance processes to support its growth.
Even changes such as a transition to bag tagging within the last 12 months are ones Peter Schumann, Sun Country's director of planning and MRO, describes as building blocks—the technology will next be utilized for tracking parts movements, he explains.
“It’s just little steps like that, that allow us to scale and grow the future of the airline while meeting our service level commitments with the staffing that we have today,” Schumann said during a panel at Aviation Week Network’s MRO Americas Conference.
“The mantra that we’re going towards is automate the airline, and we’re just taking one bite-sized chunk at a time to do that so we can bring us into easily over 100 aircraft,” he added.
The carrier currently has an in-service fleet of 49 aircraft—Boeing 737-800s (40) and -800Fs (9)—according to Aviation Week Network’s Fleet Discovery database.
“On the whole, Sun Country we’re probably in our infancy on major, ‘coming up to speed’ of technological advancements in the hangar space,” Schumann continued.
Sun Country counts another step forward in its resource planning as the recent transition of its life vest program over to radio-frequency identification (RFID), which has speeded routine maintenance and security inspections.
“When you’re talking about 186 seats on one of our 737-800 single-class configurations, that bleeds into a lot of technician time ... for us it really adds up, especially the size we are and the scale that we’re growing.”
A technology transition is also ongoing at Endeavor Air, and “really, in the last couple of years it has really ramped up in terms of different technologies that we’re looking at doing—modernizing how we do things,” said Greg Lambert, the regional carrier's director of business administration, heavy check and planning.
While a number of projects are underway, Lambert said during the panel that significant progress was being made on one multi-year project in particular: an integrated maintenance manual and job card system, following “a number of twists and turns.”
Endeavor is now “just on the cusp of being able to release kind of a new manual system which is really going to serve as a foundation for us to get an integrated job card system,” Lambert said. The new system will then work “harmoniously in terms of giving a whole lot more information to our technicians,” he added.
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