NON GOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATION
Mr F M Jauregui Tel: +1 972 355 3703
IFA Vice President – AmericasFax: +1 972 355 9187
PO Box 270718e-mail:
Flower Mound
TX 75027-0718
USA
May 3, 2006
Report on Aviation Week and Air Transport Association Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul Conference & Exhibitions—April 25-27, 2006 Phoenix, Arizona.
Introduction:
IFA Technical and Executive Committees have been discussing the MRO conferences that are being held in several venues of the world. Recently Phil Hosey attended the European MRO and gave a very good report of items discussed and presentations. I personally felt there are many Items discussed that have a great deal of relevancy to the Goals and Strategies of IFA.
Conference Summary:
The conference was openedby Ed Hazlewood, Editorial Director, Aviation Week Conferences, with three other panel members, each giving opening remarks. They said this was the largest MRO conference held to date. He stated there were 6500 paid attendees at the conference. However, he did not break out how many were there for the Military MRO taking PLACE April 25th and 26th, who also had to pay the attendance fee.
Note: I saw about 600 to 650 in the various meetings, not anywhere near 6500!
The numbers of exhibitors were overwhelming. Even the FAA had a stand, manned for two days passing out literature. They had over 400 companies, including many OEM’s like Boeing, Airbus, Pratt and Whitney, GE all demonstrating their innovative products, services, and concepts.
I was told, by the conference management, that I would receive an email access code to a special web site where the “presentations” could be downloaded, this was to come to all signed up attendees. I will send the information to the IFA Secretariat as soon as I receive it.
One of the presentations from the CEO of Team SAI addressed the world aviation market place, some 18,000 commercial aircraft, of which 10 % are freighters, are flying and requiring maintenance and material support of some type, MRO’s are just one of the growing venues. They displayed that while Asia is a large importer of work, Europe is also importing work while the USA is exporting it. This data and overview should be in the presentations that we should be granted access to.
Relative to the presentations, at least in the ones I was able to attend, they were all tailored to Sales, or Promotion of the presenter’s Product. I found it quite interesting to listen very carefully for the word “SAFETY” in the presentations. During the first two hours I did not hear the word ONCE, as opposed to the IASS conferences use of it. It was conspicuous by its absence.
Some presenter’s had interesting information like what Boeing is doing for Tailored Customer Support including OEM Maintenance Control for their aircraft, and how the 777 and 787 airplanes’ will interface with the new technologies, if the customer wants to pay for it. Airbus provided a very similar interactive demonstration for the A-380 airplane for their customers. Quite interesting but raised many questions for me as to compliance with Airworthiness regulatory requirements will be administered?
The session on PMAs & Continuous Airworthiness Support was well attended, about 150-200 individuals, was also very commercially driven. Moderator was the Northern California Bureau Chief, Aviation Week & Space Technology, panel members and presenter’s where; VP General Manager Pratt & Whitney Global Material Services, Director Engineering and Maintenance Alaska Airlines, Chairman MARPA Committee for Continued Operational Safety (COS), and Manager, Certification Procedures Branch, Aircraft Engineering Division, Aircraft Certification Service, FAA. Quite a group to hear speak of what has been done to get an
FAA Order 8110-42b issued for guidance for PMA parts’ and to clarify FAR 21.303. It would be very interesting to see what a review of this “Order” by another airworthiness authority would provide in terms of its acceptability for “global acceptance of PMA PARTS. This is certainly one area from the MRO that should interest IFA Technical Committee, in my opinion. The discussion time was limited and pointed out that there is still a lot of “interpretation” surrounding PMA PARTS, authority, use, conformity, support etc. The Panel, as you will note even had an engine OEM discussing PMA parts. I ask if the OEM’s were going to put the PMA pat numbers in the IPC of the affected equipment. As you can guess there was no good answer given. Later a Boeing individual told me “they” would not do it. I suspect that no OEM would put a PMA part number in their IPC and provide support for that product just because an airworthiness authority gave authorization to manufacture and sell the part. This will be a mine field to get sorted out.
The session Executive Roundtable Panel/Presentations gave similar views on where feeder airlines (Mesa Airlines) small airlines (Spirit Airlines) fractional jet services (NetJets Aviation, Inc.) and MRO provider (Lufthansa Technik) are heading and their consideration of MRO’s.
Conclusions:
The presentations, both in sessions and in the exhibition hall, provided forecasts and views of where commercial aviation is going what is being discussed and offered by vendors and OEM’s are where the MRO providers and USERS are going to go for information and to be current with the industry. The presentations, mostly Power Point, will be somewhat dry and not nearly as interesting as hearing the words spoken that are not on the slides or on the paper.
Yours sincerely
Mr F M Jauregui, IFA Vice President – America