Aftermarket services specialist AAR Corp. is using lessons learned from a challenging but ultimately beneficial expansion to help avoid similar start-up headaches, its top executive shared.
AAR opened its Rockford, Illinois, hangar in 2016 with a plan to attract widebody airframe maintenance but without any long-term contracts to help fill the facility. It survived on smaller deals and overflow work with existing customers. Customer stability finally arrived in April 2021 via a narrowbody airframe heavy check agreement with long-time AAR customer United Airlines.
“It took a long time to get that operation up and running,” AAR President and CEO John Holmes said during the recent Aviation Week MRO Americas conference in Chicago.
The United deal spotlighted another challenge: ensuring AAR was staffed up for the work. A partnership with Rockford’s Rock Valley College helped solve that issue.
“We’ve developed a really nice partnership with them and have been supportive of multiple scholarships at the school,” Holmes said. “The students graduate and come right over and start working for us.”
AAR is working on major expansions in Miami and Oklahoma City, where it already has sizable airframe maintenance operations. While adding hangars to an existing location is different than a geographical expansion, the company is applying lessons learned from Rockford.
The Miami expansion, announced in March, was prompted by another deal with United that will see AAR provide a minimum of 10 maintenance lines in the South Florida city and Rockford combined.
In Oklahoma City, AAR needs more lines to support a Boeing 737 airframe maintenance contract extension with Alaska Airlines.
The United and Alaska deals helped ensure both expansions met AAR’s minimum standards for investing in new facilities.
“We’ll only go into a new market and open a new facility or build a new facility [in an existing market] if three things are true,” Holmes said. “We’ve got to make a customer willing to make a long-term commitment. We have to have a friendly airport environment that’s supportive and will provide funding for construction. And we [need] access to talent.”
