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Air Europa outsources nearly all of its base maintenance to Mallorca-based Globalia Maintenance.
Amid parts shortages and scarce slot availability, Air Europa Chief Technical Officer Pedro Macias Dominguez talks with James Pozzi about how its maintenance division is tapping into partnerships while considering internal investment to help overcome hurdles.
What is the dynamic between Air Europa and Globalia Maintenance? Air Europa Maintenance is purely an entity with a European Union Aviation Safety Agency Part 145 organization, a [Continuing Airworthiness Management Organization (CAMO)] associated with the [air operator certificate] of the airline and an approved Part 147 Training Center where we support our internal training requirements and [those of] our customers. Globalia Maintenance is focused on heavy maintenance activities and operates as the perfect complement to the daily maintenance of Air Europa. The relationship between Air Europa Maintenance and Globalia Maintenance is a strategic partnership to improve our maintenance operations.
As an airline, what does Air Europa look for in an MRO partner? As a customer, Air Europa will always look for the appropriate slot, with the right turnaround time and a competitive cost. This is obvious in a way, but it is important to emphasize that what we look for in an MRO are the skills and certification to solve problems that could be found during heavy maintenance. What I am referring to when I say solving problems is having the skills, capacity and know-how to repair and solve corrosion issues, structural repairs, wiring repairs and modifications.
Who are some of your MRO partners and what do they repair? Globalia Maintenance is our main and most important heavy maintenance provider. In terms of engines, for the CFM International CFM56 engine that powers Boeing 737 aircraft, we have a contract for engine shop visits with Iberia Maintenance at its engine shop in Madrid. For components in our two fleets of 737 and 787 aircraft, we work in a structure with different pool providers, depending on the fleet, to have the best performance in each fleet.
Does Air Europa outsource most of its maintenance? In our main hub in Madrid Airport, we have our own line maintenance station with nearly 200 employees doing a fantastic job in our daily operation. I can say the same for our four additional line maintenance stations in Barcelona, Mallorca, Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where our team is also doing a great job supporting our fleet. As you can imagine, at our destinations in Europe and Latin America we have to outsource line maintenance activities to local providers, as the intention is to cover the on-call maintenance in case of need. As mentioned before, for heavy maintenance activities, Globalia Maintenance, with its two hangars—one in Madrid dedicated to widebody aircraft and another in Palma de Mallorca for narrowbody aircraft—is providing us with all the support for C checks, engine changes and landing gear changes. Globalia Maintenance performs 85-95% of our heavy maintenance requirements.
Has Air Europa experienced a lack of MRO capacity and slot availability in the market? If so, how has this impacted your fleet maintenance planning? It is getting more and more difficult to find specific slots for widebody aircraft and paint slots. These are, I would say, the two more difficult slots to be found. For this reason, it is important to have Globalia Maintenance as a partner for heavy maintenance, mainly in their new hangar in Madrid, specially dedicated to widebody aircraft.
How is Air Europa feeling the impact of parts shortages? These parts shortages are the most relevant problem we have nowadays in our industry, not only for the lack of parts on the market but because of the escalation in pricing due to the low supply and high demand. So we need to be smart to face this situation. As a business, we are working hard with data analysis, checking trend consumption and trying to know in advance the material needs we will have to ensure for our stock and our purchases.
How is Air Europa preparing for the introduction of the Boeing 737 MAX? The 737 MAX is quite like the 737NG operation. All contracts we have for components support are already adapted, taking into consideration the entry into service of the 737 MAX. In our line maintenance and CAMO operations, everything is already prepared just to push the button and get the right certification as soon as the first delivery from Boeing is confirmed. To date, everything for this entry into service is running smoothly.
What technologies is Air Europa looking to invest in for its maintenance operations? Innovation and continuous improvement are one of the main pillars, in our view, of how to develop maintenance operations in an airline. An example of this was in 2021, during the COVID period—we were able to go live with TRAX, which is our main [enterprise resource planning software] in our organization. This meant entering the digital world in relation to all the maintenance processes. Since that moment, we have become paperless. Our line maintenance engineers and mechanics started to sign all the job cards in their tablets. Material management started also to be conducted in real time—the same for planning follow-up from the CAMO department, for instance.
Is the airline maintenance division considering wider adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools? Yes, the plan is focused on having AI tools as a solution for material management and strategic purchasing and predictive maintenance. We are currently finalizing our market research to choose the best partners, as these AI projects will be launched next year.
Post-pandemic, the industry has lost a lot of technical experience. What has been Air Europa’s experience with this and how has it looked to bridge the talent gap? Our team is the secret to how we managed to leave behind the pandemic times and how we have recovered from it, having positive results in operational performance and from a financial standpoint. The churn in our staff working at our offices as planners, engineers, admins, storemen, purchasers and other roles has been reduced. We have been able to feed our organization with people from the industry who wanted to join us despite the competition in the market. This mix of people is the key aspect of our current strong performance.
Alternatively, what strategies is Air Europa using to attract young people into careers as airline mechanics and engineers? For mechanics, the advantage we have in Air Europa is that we have our apprentice program to train, teach and give them the chance to get the official license B1/2. This assures us of having every year a mechanic promotion. Once working in the airline, young mechanics benefit from an automatic promotion if their aptitude, learning and performance are satisfactory. For engineers, the approach is different, as we start visiting Spanish aerospace engineering universities to let them know about how we work in the maintenance area of an airline. We believe that as students, they lack a realistic view or knowledge about what we do, and it is worth showing how dynamic, how challenging and how many opportunities for a professional career we offer.
Air Europa Airlines Fact File
Headquarters: Llucmajor, Mallorca, Spain
History: Founded in 1986, Air Europa started as part of the British ILG-Air Europe Group, with Spanish banks holding a majority ownership. Initially, it operated flights across Europe on Boeing 737-300 and 757 aircraft. Over the following decade, the airline grew its fleet, adding 737-800s in the late 1990s before expanding routes outside Europe. In late 2019, International Airlines Group (IAG)—parent of British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus and Vueling—announced plans to acquire Air Europa. After a long period of uncertainty exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the merger was shelved in late 2021. In August 2022, IAG converted a loan into a 20% shareholding in Air Europa. Both parties looked to revive the deal in 2023, but in August this year, IAG pulled out of a potential acquisition following disagreements with the European Commission relating to antitrust conditions for the takeover.
Fleet: Air Europa operates an all-Boeing fleet of 737s and 787s, with a total of 43 aircraft as of August. The airline has an order in place for 20 737 MAX aircraft, with plans to take delivery of the first three this year from lessor AerCap. The airline’s flying destinations include Spain and Europe, South America, North America, the Caribbean and North Africa.
In-house MRO Capabilities: Air Europa is a line maintenance, CAMO and Part 147 organization. For line maintenance, the carrier has a third-party business offering that supports 737, 787 and Airbus A330 aircraft. Air Europa outsources most base maintenance to Mallorca-based Globalia Maintenance.
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