Engine tooling support established from scratch in three months

Cooperation with ANA extended

All Nippon Airways (ANA), which was founded in 1952 and carried over 52 million passengers and 1.4 million metric tons of air cargo in 2017, is the biggest airline in Japan. The company’s fleet is made up of 218 airplanes, with the average age of its aircraft coming in at 9.4 years. By 2020, ANA is planning to increase its passenger volume by 40% and expand its entire fleet to more than 300 airplanes. Finally, as of this writing, the airline primarily maintains its fleet at its hubs in Tokyo Narita, Tokyo Haneda, Osaka, and Kansai.

In-house engine maintenance maximizes flexibility

Having the required amount of tools with the necessary quality is an absolute necessity for the regular engine maintenance that airlines need to carry out. The topmost priority within this context? Minimizing aircraft downtimes. This means that missing tools, as well as tools that are out of order or have not been maintained, are absolutely unacceptable, as they will quickly result in an Aircraft on Ground (AOG) scenario that will become expensive for everyone involved.

Airlines normally send their fleet’s engines to MROs that are specialized in the corresponding maintenance. This, however, comes with a disadvantage: When the maintenance interval for a widespread engine changes, this can quickly result in bottlenecks at the relevant specialized engine MROs. And since ANA has 63 B787 models with Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines in its fleet, the company decided to move maintenance operations for Trent 1000 engines to its own hangars and its own personnel. However, this increased flexibility meant that the company had to acquire all the tools required to perform the aforementioned maintenance.

Final assembly lines for engines equipped with more than 1,500 engine tools

HYDRO supplied the airline with all the tools needed to maintain the Trent 1000 in record time. In fact, HYDRO was able to deliver all particularly critical tool packages directly to the customer in Japan in a mere three months, with the actual overall package consisting of more than 1,500 tools.

With all this in place, ANA now has the flexibility required to perform its own engine maintenance. This is just one more way in which HYDRO has supported the airline with products and solutions from its various business units for a period of more than 15 years. The key to the longevity of this business relationship? The reliability and unrivalled product quality that characterize HYDRO.