Lufthansa Technik (LHT), the independently operated maintenance, repair and overhaul arm of Germany's flag airline, is finding a large market in VIP and head-of-state aircraft in addition to its position as an airline maintenance services provider.

"If you go to our major overhaul hangars in Hamburg today, you'll see that there's only one non-executive aircraft in there," Wolfgang Mayrhuber, LHT's chairman of the board, told Show News. But there are seven business and head-of-state planes. "There's one Airbus A340, three Boeing 747s, one A319CJ and two BBJs," he said.

LHT's market in business/VIP aircraft is "growing dramatically" on the company's balance sheets, Mayrhuber said, so much so that it has been dedicated a separate business unit with its own hangar at Hamburg.

"We've started LHT VIP/Executive Jet Services," he said. "They're dedicated to this work, they have their own design people and engineers and their own balance sheet to look to. But they also can rely on our other technical shops to support them."

By now, LHT has done more than 100 VIP cabin refurbishments, and the new business unit has seen solid capacity expansion. "But we've grown the business in a careful way, only expanding as we could assure we had the quality of people," Mayrhuber said. "We started with one completion line; now we're up to three."

LHT has become one of the main competitors for BBJ and A319CJ completions. It delivered its first completed BBJ to Atlas Air chairman Michael Chowdry, who flew it here Monday for NBAA. BBJ work is a natural for LHT, Mayrhuber said: "We were doing executive interiors on 737s long before BBJ." Not to mention the fact that Lufthansa Airlines was a launch customer for the 737 in the early 1970s.

LHT's BBJ completion program set a number of milestones: it was the first to receive simultaneous FAA, JAA and CAAC airworthiness certificates; the first executive jet completion by LHT to undergo newly required smoke-detection testing, and the first to earn its FAA STC outside the U.S.
In its completions and support work, LHT is dedicated to making sure that the aircraft fly right every time, Mayrhuber said. "A business jet is like a harvester, to use a rural analogy. If it doesn't work when you need it, you are out of business. It has to be available 100% of the time."