Aerogility attends MRO Europe, Amsterdam

Phil Cole, Senior Consultant, and Alex Wenk, Technical Lead, attended MRO Europe at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam this month, the largest gathering of the aviation maintenance community in Europe.

This year’s exhibition attracted the greatest number of delegates to date, with more than 9000 visitors representing 105 countries, including 447 exhibitors and more than 800 airline attendees. With its extensive range of stands and talks, MRO Europe was a great opportunity to keep up to date with key industry trends, issues and concerns.

During the show, Phil and Alex took the opportunity to attend several talks, including a panel discussion on ‘predictive maintenance and data analytics for proactive supply chains.’ The topics discussed included ownership of data, where the general consensus was that data should belong to the organisation that generates it, regardless of who owns the asset; potential disruption by major internet players making inroads into electric cars and autonomous vehicles and potentially the MRO market; and retrofitting analytic gathering systems to older aircraft. On the latter, an interesting point was made that older aircraft are more expensive to maintain and have more AOG outages due to the lack of predictive maintenance capabilities. However, there were mixed opinions on this topic due to the cost of the retrofit versus the remaining life of the aircraft.

The talk the team found particularly fascinating was ‘rotorcraft power by the hour’, in which Carolyn Forsyth from Heli-One and Michael Reagan from Bell gave presentations on the complexity of providing power by the hour (PBH) maintenance contracts. Michael discussed the factors to consider when planning and costing PBH contracts for a fleet of 8500 rotorcraft across the globe, including climate conditions, logistics, limitations in flying range of assets to get them to maintenance bases, maintaining the right amount of spares in the right place, as well as being able to support the plethora of configurations each model can be fitted with.

Phil tells us: “Attending MRO Europe is a great way to stay updated with current market trends and developments, whilst discovering new opportunities to expand Aerogility’s business and fill gaps in the MRO market. Alex and I enjoyed exploring the exhibition centre and discussing new developments within the industry with fellow MRO professionals.”

MRO Europe takes place annually and will next be held in London in October 2019.