Happy 2020! Instead of creating New Year’s resolutions, a friend of mine selects a word of the year to serve as a guidepost. Her word this year is grateful. If you were to select a word to guide you through the year, what would it be?
A word for the robust commercial aviation aftermarket—pegged at $82.5 billion in 2020 by Aviation Week Network forecasts—could be many things: opportunistic, constrained, innovative, challenging or optimized.
Take “opportunistic” and “constrained.” The $82.5 billion market is projected to grow to $106.8 billion in 2029. Over the decade, OEMs will deliver 23,300 new aircraft, and operators will retire 10,765. Engine-makers will deliver more than 46,640 engines and spares.
The engine market, which represents 42% of total spending, is higher this year, largely due to more expensive shop visits and spare parts. With mature engines staying on wing longer and newer engines coming into the shop earlier, it’s creating a traffic jam. James Pozzi does an excellent job examining the capacity constraints and how companies are adapting.
Optimizing is a key word for almost everything that happens in this industry, and tools such as data-driven maintenance can help achieve that.
For instance, Emirates Airline has been collaborating with Boeing, using its Optimized Maintenance Program to streamline its 777 maintenance. By evaluating Emirates’ operational data and considering its unique operating environment, the program has extended both A and C checks. “Like everything else, there’s always a tinge of nerves about what surprises it could bring to the operation that we did not take into our calculations,” Ahmed Safa, Emirates vice president of engineering and maintenance, tells Inside MRO. “But so far, we have not had a single question mark about whether it was a good decision.”
While data-driven decisions will make the industry more efficient, Ray Valeika, an industry veteran who has closely followed advancing technologies’ impact on aviation, brings up several interesting points in his guest editorial, including the question of data privacy, which we all face in our personal lives.
While technology advancements bring many benefits, they also bring challenges. Just the data piece alone poses many—including being in different formats, with much trapped on paper, not to mention security.
As Valeika says, “progress brings challenges.”
So in addition to a word of the year, I’d like to propose a quote of the year, too: “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf,” says Jon Kabat-Zinn.
