I also look after the Availability Control Centre (ACC), which looks at all the aircraft in our fleet in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The ACC aims to keep our engines on-wing for as long as they can be by providing targeted maintenance solutions.
Another specialist team I look after, which is right at the front line when it comes to fixing the Trent 1000 fleet, is our global on-wing services team. They work with our airline partners every day, inspecting and repairing engines. Increasingly they are devising and deploying quite specialist techniques that we have developed over the last 12 – 24 months to help give us better insights into how the Trent 1000 engines are behaving and their overall condition.
Introducing the engine maintenance control team
In the last 12 months we introduced the engine maintenance control team, and it has been instrumental in how we are responding to issues with the Trent 1000. This is a team who get to know our customers, from their flight plans, right through to planning how we get engines into repair and overhaul centres, optimising to get the right engines into the right shop at the right time. It’s a role that looks at everything we do from sea and air freight right through to arranging on-wing services mechanics to be in the right place to help.
Finally, a team that has continued to innovate over the past 12 months and has been able to add capacity and value to the whole of the group is our campaigns team. This team has set up agile near-wing service hubs around the world that are able to take on work on certain engines to avoid the need to travel to centralised overhaul hubs, which significantly reduces turnaround times. Before initiating the campaigns team in 2018 all of our engines went to traditional repair shops. Now, in just a year we have delivered 300 engine repairs through these near-wing bases. That journey continues and while, yes it began as a response to the Trent 1000 challenge, it shows us that there is a different way of working. That will be one of the sustainable aspects that comes out of this challenge.
While, of course, we would rather not have product challenges, there have been some incredible learnings along the way about how we can run an ever more efficient operation that can keep pace with our airline customers, while giving us insight that will continue to benefit all of our Trent engines and how we service them into the future.