HONG KONG—More cross-industry collaboration is needed in the engine aftermarket to drive more opportunities in a segment where demand currently outstrips supply, the CEO of HAECO has told Aviation Week Network’s Aero-Engines Asia-Pacific conference.
“There's a lot we can do in my view over and above that and it will to a degree, depend on a call from the OEMs to encourage cooperation across their networks,” HAECO Group CEO Richard Sell said April 24 in his keynote address here in Hong Kong.
Sell believes sharing in “uncontroversial” areas such as quality, safety and best practice between industry stakeholders can eventually lead on to more commercial opportunities in a future market which he sees being heavily weighted in favor of MROs given the balance of demand outstripping supply.
“It may well also require us to start small and develop that confidence between the different organizations so that we can build to bigger and better things over time,” Sell said. “If we're open minded to those sorts of opportunities, then then there's a lot that can be done."
Sell believes this collaboration is already occurring to some degree and pinpoints component MRO as an area of HAECO’s business that demonstrates this. He says HAECO has leveraged partnership networks for a long time in this area.
He notes the industry’s demand surge for MRO services—which has followed the introduction of new engine types and continued airline recovery—has led to capacity constraints across the global MRO network.
At the same time, legacy engine types are remaining in service for up to a decade longer than expected. “This presents a unique challenge for all of us in the MRO sector, as we must invest in new products to secure future volume whilst also managing the demands of existing engine types,” he said.
Sell pinpointed innovation as key to aiding the industry against these challenges. He believes technologies such as predictive maintenance, condition monitoring and data analytics are key tools for the future of engine MRO. “These breakthroughs have allowed us to start to move away from the traditional reactive maintenance model towards a more proactive approach and a data driven focus,” he said.
Sell added that artificial intelligence, robotics and automation hold significant potential to improve efficiency and reduce downtime across the MRO industry.
For HAECO’s engine operations, it has explored robotics to carry out repetitive inspection tasks. In the broader business, the MRO has adopted drones to carry out aircraft inspections; Sell said that to date it has carried out inspections on more than 500 aircraft this way.
In its warehouse, HAECO has driven greater efficiency through using automated guided vehicles. Sell hopes that AI will in future lead to long-term efficiency gains across the business.
Sell also sees future cross-industry collaboration as imperative in shaping the future of engine MRO. MRO providers, engine manufacturers, airlines and regulatory bodies need to establish stronger partnerships, he said.
Sell said the industry is increasingly seeing OEMs focusing less on sending engines to shops around the world and instead, wanting more capacity in regions closer to operators.
“Scenarios where a company disassembles, assembles and tests an engine in one shop and someone else does module work in another to optimize that network is an area of opportunity,” he said. Maximizing regional capacity and a desire to minimize capital expenditure also fits with the sustainability agenda, Sell added.
Long term, Sell sees increased adoption of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) as being a big step in the eventual decarbonization of aviation, but warns that there are still hurdles to clear.
“We've got a long way to go in terms of in-region [SAF] supply as well as the cost and the mechanics of that,” he said. “We’re expecting SAF volumes to increase … but not as fast as we would all like—a lot of airlines are making 2030 commitments and if you aggregate it, it's hard to see how that's going to work. But eventually we will crack that particular nut and for MRO we will then be of the solution.”
With SAF a longer-term consideration, Sell said it will be newer engine types with greater fuel-burn capacities that will have the greatest sustainability impact in the near term.
