How Air France Industries will repair the Boeing 787 |
| Guillaume Lecompte-Boinet |
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02 MAR 2017 | 563 words
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© Le Journal de l'Aviation - tous droits réservés |
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The MRO department of Air France, some of whose facilities we were able to visit at Roissy in the context of a meeting with the Association of Professional Aviation and Space Journalists (AJPAE), is starting the repairs on the newest offering from Boeing, the 787. In the Helios hangar, where AFI performs the MRO of aerostructures, the first 787 components have arrived for repair, such as the engine covers for example.
The group has made several investments in order to capture the MRO market of the 787s, the first of which joined Air France's fleet last January. As Jacques Dauvergne highlighted in our interview of 2 February, AFI has signed several maintenance contracts with a dozen airlines concerning nearly 150 aircraft.
These investments include the purchase of licences from the original equipment manufacturers (OEM). For example, AFI has acquired a licence to perform major repairs on the 787 nacelles with Goodrich (UTAS). This process is more and more widespread in the MRO sector, each of these licences costing several million euros. Previously, AFI carried out a repair and then had it approved by the OEM, which resulted in a loss of time. The OEMs nevertheless issue a very limited number of licences, one or two per continent for the sake of scarcity. And the MRO firms, such as AFI KLM E&M, must invest in complete batches of parts in order to offer spare parts to their customers at preferential prices. Thanks to its design office, AFI can develop the repair kits itself, and have the repair registered with the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which delivers a Design Organisation Agreement (DOA). "The DOA focuses on the quality of our organisation," says Dominique Vialtet, manager of the Hardware and Services Department.
The difference with the 787 is that Boeing has indicated to the airlines and the MRO firms that the management of the 787's MRO was relatively free. It would no longer be governed by the classic periodic A, B, C and D-checks. Like the Airbus A350, these aircraft now have much longer repair intervals between two checks. For heavier checks (D-check), the most costly, these intervals have doubled, from 5-6 years to more than 10 years according to the manufacturers. "We can therefore organise as we like in compliance with the regulations," adds Dominique Vialtet. Thus, the A-check, normally carried out in a hangar every three months, is virtually disappearing with the 787, because it can be carried out regularly during stopover. The repairer will only see the aircraft in the hangar for the C-check, which is carried out every 18 months and requires between 3 and 5 days of immobilisation. This entails a reduction of MRO costs for the operators, which are Air France or KLM... but less activity for the AFI KLM Engineering & Maintenance repairer. Similarly, the professionals deem that the D-check will also disappear with the 787 because it can be split into parts and therefore carried out throughout the life cycle of the aircraft without immobilising it as much as before. This new organisation, which will upset the work in the hangars, is also stimulated by a series of changes in the processes, with the robotisation of certain operations and the advent of predictive MRO thanks to big data. AFI KLM E&M is equipped with centres dedicated to big data, in Paris and Amsterdam, in order to develop these new processes.
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