Caring for customers & their vital missions to combat COVID-19

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As the world responds to the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, a small dedicated team in Derby is helping to ensure vital flights can continue right around the world.

Our Availability Control Centre (ACC) employees monitor Trent and RB211 engines 24/7 and 365 days of the year, ensuring they are available and ready to power aircraft. In addition, they ensure that spare engines are in position to be introduced into service when needed, with the correct engineering teams and tools in place to make that happen.

Critical work continues

Right now, their work has never been more critical. For while the number of engines in service may have reduced, those flights that are continuing are more important than ever, delivering aid and medical equipment, and ensuring people can get home to their loved ones.

The ACC normally tracks engines on around 1,000 aircraft in the air at any one time and while that figure has reduced, it actually means more, not less, work for the team.

It means creating new engine management plans for the aircraft out of service, working out with airlines what proactive maintenance is required to ensure they are ready to go back into service as soon as the pandemic reduces and flights resume.

Some operators actually need to fly their fleets more frequently – for example freight firms that are keeping medical supplies, aid and goods for the global economy moving.

The Availability Control Centre monitors our engines 24/7 (note: this is a library picture taken prior to social distancing measures)

A care network ready to respond

For Lee McConnellogue, Senior Vice President, Aircraft Availability Services, it’s an incredible juggling act, keeping our service network ready to respond to rapidly changing operator requirements.

“Our customers still have the same number of aircraft, but the utilisation has changed – so while the number of aircraft flying at any one time has reduced, in fact our workload has increased, because we now have to understand new customer requirements. That means additional maintenance schedules for those in service, and challenges such as engine storage, preservation, and the creation of proactive maintenance plans to allow customers to be ahead of the curve for when times improve.

“And at the same time, some operators are changing the types of aircraft they are using, such as larger aircraft to enable them to carry both passengers and a greater amount of ‘belly freight’.”

Supporting our own teams through the pandemic while also responding to evolving customer requirements and ensuring business continuity, has meant changes on the ground.

Team information

“We’ve got a new command structure with daily ‘town halls’ to give the team information and also stop any false rumours that might lead us to make a misstep,“ said McConnellogue. “Because we are a global organisation with people operating in isolation, I’m doing a personal message that cascades down through the team, so within a few minutes I can be through the organisation – praising good work, explaining what is going on and giving people comfort that senior leadership is there for them. And we are getting good feedback.

“At Derby we’ve divided the ACC up into two teams that work from our normal home at Lombard House and the other team at Jubilee House to improve our business continuity planning – they do virtual handovers to each other. Less infrastructure-dependent teams such as materials management are working from home. So every day we are thinking about how we set up teams and how we might have to move if the situation changes. And so far we’ve kept the fleet flying and we’ve honoured all of our commitments, which is a huge credit to everyone.

“We also have new travel complexities for our engineering teams. If we send flyaway teams to countries where we don’t already have a presence, that team is now locked down for 14 days. So we are working hard with our logistics teams to make sure we have people in the right place where the demand is.”

Bringing forward digital solutions

Extraordinary times also call for new solutions and we are increasing the use of some of the new digital tools we were already using, as part of our IntelligentEngine vision.

The Librestream digital tool allows our engineers to analyse images taken from remote locations (note: this is a library picture taken prior to social distancing measures)

We had already introduced Librestream, a new collaboration tool where still pictures and video imagery from a probe inside the engine can be shared between customer and Rolls-Royce engineering teams. It is ideal for times when a Rolls-Royce engineer cannot personally be on site – allowing customers to continue to benefit from our engineering expertise remotely.

“We’ve been using Librestream for a while but this crisis has asked us to push ourselves and ask what can we do to increase it in both scale and scope? So we are working closely with customers to give them greater abilities to carry out their own inspections,” adds Lee.

“We can use the system to train customers remotely and interpret their findings, which we need to do in a world where travel is restricted, but we need to make sure our customers are comfortable and with us on any changes we make.”