How Swiss International Air Lines Went Paperless For Maintenance

Claus Bauer, head of technical fleet management at Swiss International Air Lines and process owner engineering at Lufthansa Group, tells James Pozzi why it chose to insource some MRO services during the pandemic and how it is adopting paperless operations across its activities.

How is the aviation market recovering in Switzerland and the wider European region since COVID-19?

The development last year was very positive, and Swiss is also currently absolutely satisfied with the booking situation. Last year, we ran at around 70% capacity relative to the density of the flight plans that we had in 2019, before the pandemic. This year, we are expecting to be at 80%-85% of 2019 capacity and then hopefully climb back to pre-crisis levels in 2024 and later.

How has the maintenance team worked to help the airline reactivate its fleet after COVID-19?

The pandemic has been a tough period for the airline and its maintenance division. Given the uncertainties, a lot of flexibility was required. As the pandemic drags on, it has been important not to reactivate aircraft too early, as this would lead to unnecessary costs when resources were scarce. However, if you started too late with the reactivation, you would not have the assets to fly in accordance with the flight plan resumption. We planned this well and did it at the right time. Given the very long and expensive education needed to become a B1/B2 licensed mechanic, which can take six years or more, our ambition was to protect our team through the crisis as best we could. This meant protecting our technical training organization from cuts at the height of the pandemic. No classes were cut, and we have made only reasonable reductions in technical staff. Ultimately, this proved to be the correct decision.

What services do you perform in-house for maintenance?

At our home bases in Zurich and Geneva, we do line maintenance for our fleet, and we perform all A checks on our short- and long-haul fleet. On certain aircraft types, such as the A220, we also perform C checks in-house. Additionally, we operate 12 line maintenance stations worldwide. Besides the line maintenance and checks activities, we do repairs (mostly structural), engine checks and changes—including quick engine changes and various inspections.

How did you manage the fact that there was much less work during the height of the pandemic?

During the crisis, we temporarily insourced some maintenance services, particularly in the  modifications segment. We also received some deliveries of new aircraft during the crisis, we insourced the installation of dedicated cargo loading systems, we implemented EFBs in the cockpit for our pilots and we installed our new premium economy seats in our Boeing 777 fleet. Furthermore we insourced light C checks for Airbus A220 aircraft to keep the team busy during the down period. Most of the fleet was initially parked in Switzerland, but when it became apparent that the pandemic would continue for longer, we flew most of the aircraft we didn’t need to Amman, Jordan, for storage at MRO provider Joramco. The climate and space available there were attractive factors, but we were also aware that many aircraft would need base maintenance checks upon reactivation. There may be good parking opportunities for aircraft at other places, but for reactivation which requires bigger checks, there can be problems because the operator must ferry the aircraft to another location with a permit to fly before undertaking some maintenance work required before you can return to service. Joramco as an MRO provider was very flexible with our needs. 

What are the key elements of Swiss’ MRO strategy, and what does the airline look for in an MRO partner?

In the pandemic, flexibility was the key criteria for the previously explained reasons. The more an airline reverts to normal operations, the most important turnaround times (TAT) and quality of service are. Our fleet had a high utilization rate before the crisis, and this meant scarce ground times for the maintenance teams to be able to access the aircraft and do whatever's necessary. Our airframe is mostly calendar based instead of flight-hour and flight cycle based, whenever possible we try to perform external checks in the less busy winter season.

Asset-related maintenance work demand from Swiss did not drop that much in the pandemic and that’s why we kept the airframe MRO partners consistently busy. We operate across a network of MRO partners and we don’t have any exclusive strategic partnerships where we will put all of our eggs into one basket. Outside of Europe, we work with HAECO in Hong Kong on widebody maintenance for Boeing 777 and Airbus A340 aircraft. For engine and component maintenance, like many we hit the brakes at the height of the pandemic as a means of preserving cashflow. However, this presented a tricky scenario for us as when demand returned from these services, it would likely lead to a congested market for MRO slots to service engines and components.

I don’t think we’ve hit the sweet spot in full perfection in all cases, but we managed to ramp up last summer on time. It’s been a balancing act and largely, things have worked out well. The key competence needed in maintenance divisions in order to be able to meet the sweet spot is utilizing good data analytics. If you have good visibility on what work will be due in the future  and what has been removed from the fleet already but not sent to the shops, you can identify what's going to come in the next 12 to 24 months and manage the wave of work.

Do you foresee more outsourcing by the airline in future?

We’re not looking to radically change anything. We did the temporary insourcing of modifications to keep the team busy and we will continue to do the light C checks for A220s for the time being. mid-term we will return to the regular outsourcing set up we have in place anyhow for heavier checks next winter. Our experience is that if you have a highly integrated CAMO and line maintenance organization, especially with good end-to-end digitally enabled processes, there are good efficiency and flexibility gains. We were doing this successfully before the pandemic and there’s been little reason to change this since.

Which maintenance technologies is Swiss investing in?

In recent years, we’ve invested heavily in digital solutions primarily with the aim of getting rid of paper in our operations. We are among the few airlines in the world doing all of our CAMO and line maintenance work paperless. By using the AMOSmobile system, this means no more work orders or instructions in paper. Each of our engineers has a tablet which gives them access to work orders and everything is signed digitally.

We also use a FlyDocs electronic archive system, which is very helpful for example in the case of aircraft returns to the lessors, who have the expectation that there are no gaps in the documentation when handing the asset back. Doing this electronically and not through paper documentation has proven to be a big benefit. The third major enabler has been the introduction of an electronic logbook (ELB). When done through paper notebooks, the crew or somebody from maintenance on ground puts in the defect but while this is in the book, often nobody would know about it. A great benefit of the ELB is they are digitally connected, meaning that immediately after the entry of new findings on the ground, our teams have full connectivity worldwide to pass on information and prepare to fix the problem in the next available ground times.

In terms of implementing this technology, our teams are enthusiastically about it as it saves paper documents being transported around and also the needs to manually transfer data from paper into IT which is time consuming and brings danger of mistakes during transfer.  With AMOSmobile we save about 1.5 million sheets of paper per year. 

What challenges has the airline experienced in the supply chain? Have you noticed longer turnaround times?

It's far from being fully recovered and is a daily challenge for our organization. This is in areas such as replenishment of our inventory levels. We’ve had challenges not only with parts we don’t require frequently, but also even some basic, routine items that are frequently used. Globally, supply chains are still very much disturbed. It puts a really high workload on our team, because nothing is accelerated but many things just consume more energy and capacity to get parts from vendors and thereafter to the place where they are needed.  

One area where things are improving is in cargo shipping capacity. At the height of COVID when there were little to no passenger flights, there were  mainly cargo aircraft operating. With belly freight capacity missing it was difficult to get transportation slots if there was an urgent shipment for parts from somewhere in the world. There are also many critical vendors who don’t get the raw material or even if they have it, they are under pressure to produce at former production rates because of the backlogs. Of course, it will take time to get rid of the backlog and get ahead of the curve again.

What are the challenges around recruiting technical staff, and how has Swiss tried to overcome them?

As mentioned, we didn’t reduce our maintenance team dramatically during the pandemic. Switzerland is a great place to live and work, so we are an international business with around every fifth employee of our team is not fluent in German, the common language in the region around Zurich. Instead, English is the common language across many of our teams. There's not a big employment market for a licensed B1 and B2 mechanics in Switzerland due to the nature of the size of the local market, and that's why it's even more important that we have our own training activities. A certain percentage of people we did not train ourselves but have been recruiting internationally. We are optimistic that we will also find employees for  future demand beyond our own training for candidates in the international labour markets.

Additionally we are very much committed to pioneering commercial aviation becoming sustainable. We have for example been globally first to apply the AeroSHARK riblet foil to our Boeing 777 fleet in order to save fuel and emissions. Such pioneering actions are exciting and raise a lot of interest especially amongst the younger generations. As part of our team you can have a really purposeful impact and contribute in shaping the future of aviation – be it in the field of digital, sustainability or others.  

Swiss International Air Lines Fact File

HISTORY: The carrier was formed following the 2002 bankruptcy of former flag carrier Swissair. After some tough initial years, Swiss started to turn a net profit by 2006. In 2007, Lufthansa Group formally took over Swiss. Currently, EdSwiss AviationSoftware, Swiss Aviation Training, Swiss WorldCargo and SWISStour are business units of the same airline group. Its headquarters are located near the city of Basel.

FLEET: The Swiss fleet consists of 88 aircraft: 31 widebodies (12 Boeing 777-300ERs, five Airbus A340-300s and 14 A330-300s) and 57 narrowbodies (19 Airbus A320s [six A320neos, 13 A320ceos], eight A321s and 30 A220-family aircraft).

HANGARS: Swiss operates hangars in Zurich and Geneva in addition to 12 line stations worldwide.