Travel demand has picked up, but difficulties getting planes grounded during the pandemic back into service is undermining air traffic capacity and driving up ticket prices
Labor shortages and supply chain disruptions are making it harder for airlines and lessors to get planes back into service. planes grounded during the pandemicdeplore the interested parties.
The fact that almost everywhere in the world the capacity of the Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) services is seized up is one of the main factors of the increase in the prices of air transport with the strong increase in the price of oil, because the recovery of demand is faster than that of supply.
“Some providers offer double-digit increases and surcharges“, underlines Mahesh Kumar, managing director of Asia Digital Engineering, the maintenance branch of the Malaysian airline AirAsia.
Congested maintenance departments
“Airlines keep raising fares but it’s not a sustainable practice“, he warned at the MRO Asia-Pacific conference in Singapore.
Such complications mean that only 110 of the 200 planes in AirAsia’s fleet have been returned to service, he added. And getting the rest of the fleet back in the air remains difficult due to the scarcity of available slots within MRO services which is also driving up their prices.
The MRO bottleneck was compounded by airlines returning planes to lessors at a much higher rate than usual during the pandemic which had crippled travel demand.
Costs and colors
Aircraft that change hands require maintenance checks, cabin modifications, and change of logo and colors on the fuselage, and these operations are carried out by MRO services. However, many are understaffed after waves of layoffs during the coronavirus crisis, and at the same time suffer from delays from parts suppliers, also mired in similar problems.
“We had real difficulties with the few paint companies that can take planes, with on top of that the inability for some to obtain special paints“, explains Robert Martin, general manager of the aircraft lessor BOC Aviation Ltd.
“If you have a multi-color logo on the back of the plane and you’re missing one of the colors, that’s somewhat problematic“, he specifies.
Right now, it takes about three months to make the changes needed to transfer a narrow-body plane from one customer to another, whereas just one was needed before the pandemic, adds Robert Martin.
Labor shortage
Jeffrey Lam, chairman of Singapore Technologies (ST) Engineering Ltd, says he suffers from insufficient hangar capacity and a lack of manpower to meet customer demand.
“The ST Engineering network is comprehensive and as a result customers are always asking for more slots“, he says.
“We are present in the United States, Europe, China and Singapore. Outside of China, all of our operations are facing labor issues.”
High demand drives up labor costs as MRO departments compete for staff and employees are expected to work more overtime, says Jeffrey Lam, who points out, however, that “we don’t want too much overtime, for the safety and quality issues that this entails“.
“Come back next year“
“We would like to be able to recruit more workers and take on more contracts. Right now we’re concerned about schedules, delivery times, costs and all that kind of stuff..”
Lessor BBAM has not had much success securing MRO slots for this winter. Its vice-president, Patrick Low, admits that he had to decline, for technical questions, the requests of certain airlines which were quickly looking for aircraft to meet the increase in demand at the time of the peak next summer.
“How fast the recovery really depends on being able to get MRO slots“, he said. “The best an MRO can tell us right now is: come back in June next year, we might have slots for you…“