This article is published in Aviation Week & Space Technology and is free to read until Nov 20, 2024. If you want to read more articles from this publication, please click the link to subscribe.
SR Technics introduced plans to undertake at least 1,000 GTF shop visits under its 10-year agreement with Pratt & Whitney.
SR Technics has added further shop capacity for the Pratt & Whitney geared turbofan aftermarket following the opening of a new overhaul facility here and reactivation of a second test cell expected to come online before year-end.
At a ceremony attended by SR Technics, Pratt & Whitney, Swiss government and local airport leaders in September, the Swiss MRO provider became the 17th active shop in the global geared turbofan (GTF) aftermarket network. SR Technics was granted GTF approval in April 2022 after signing a 10-year agreement to join the aftermarket network for the PW1100G-JM, which powers Airbus A320neo aircraft.
All GTF work at the new 65,000-ft.2 facility will be conducted separately from other engine programs to mitigate impact on SR Technics’ existing repair and overhaul capability.
The maintenance specialist will focus on full overhauls of the engine and will conduct disassembly, assembly and testing on the PW1100G-JM variant of the engine from its headquarters in Switzerland’s capital. In July, shortly before the unveiling of the new facility, the company inducted its first GTF engine and followed that up with several more in August and September.
SR Technics has targeted at least 1,000 engine shop visits over the life of the agreement after the ramp-up period is completed in Zurich. In addition to the GTF, it services CFM International CFM56-5B and -7B, Leap 1A and 1B, and PW4000-94 and -100 engines in the Swiss capital.
Florent Leforestier, SR Technics senior vice president of procurement, who led the industrialization of the GTF program, says he expects overhaul demand for the engine to pick up over the next 3-4 years. Across its portfolio in general, the maintenance provider has seen engine inductions rise steadily over the past few years. With current and future passenger traffic being weighted so heavily toward narrowbody engines, he says this dynamic made the GTF capabilities a natural fit for the MRO provider.
After a large-scale industrialization effort—the company’s first in nearly 20 years since the introduction of the CFM56 program—Leforestier says this was a particularly challenging undertaking, given the learning required for new technologies and processes.
The IT side of the business also needed adjusting, specifically related to SR Technics’ SAP enterprise resource planning system.
“We had to adjust this to allow the data format of the GTF program into the business’s processes, as it is different to older engine programs,” he says. “Everything is linked to that.”
This also coincided with a separate IT project of scale. Since the end of 2022, SR Technics has been engaged in the ongoing digital transformation ReSeT initiative, which aims to simplify and transform the company’s business operations by moving to SAP S/4HANA, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning software hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform, and incorporating HCLTech’s iMRO module add-on for it.
He says all elements of the ramp-up will play out gradually as inductions for other engine programs serviced in Zurich also increase.
“Certainly, we have targets,” Leforestier says. “When we are on the cruise altitude of, say, 300 shop visits or so, we have an estimate of 300-400 people that we will need to do that work. Of course, we are not there yet, but we have a sufficient number of people to do the maintenance in the first year.”
When it has completed several hundred shop visits, the company expects to grow its team by several hundred people to meet anticipated GTF workflows, Leforestier says.
Over the past 18 months, he says SR Technics invested “double-digit-million Swiss francs” into areas such as tooling, specialist maintenance equipment and reactivating Zurich’s second test cell, which had been inactive for several years. It had previously provided testing for Pratt & Whitney JT8D engines.
“We needed a new test cell because we did not have enough capacity for the GTF on top of what we do today,” Leforestier says.
While most of the test cell activity will focus on the GTF program, SR Technics will also have the capability to service CFM56-5B and -7B and Leap 1A and 1B engines, with a test capacity of around 200 units per year in total. Leforestier says there are two factors behind the company’s decision to bring more test capability back online.
“The first one is to mitigate risk by getting rid of a single point of failure that comes with having one test cell for all of your engine products,” he says. “Second, it gives us a bit of flexibility. We’re not going to be testing every engine that comes into the shop, but having another test cell gives us an alternative.”
Over the next few months, the test cell will undergo a commissioning and correlation phase. “This makes sure all the air flows and everything else meet the OEM’s requirements,” Leforestier says. By December, he projects SR Technics will be able to test its first GTF engine in the reactivated test cell before the CFM engines are ready, likely in the first quarter of 2025.
SR Technics’ participation in the GTF network is part of Pratt & Whitney’s ongoing plan to grow the network over the second half of this decade. The U.S.-based engine manufacturer previously outlined plans to have a network of around 30 shops with GTF capability by the end of the 2020s as it seeks more capacity to meet long-term MRO demand.
The introduction of GTF services also adds more capability for the type in Europe at Lufthansa Technik’s Hamburg engine shop and Poland-based EME Aero joint venture, Air France KLM Engineering & Maintenance’s Paris operation, and MTU Maintenance’s facilities in Hanover and Munich, Germany, as well as Zhuhai, China.
Ongoing issues related to contaminated powdered metal, which can cause cracks in part of the PW1000G engines, have led to engines returning for repair earlier than anticipated, putting a strain on some GTF operators. In September 2023, Pratt & Whitney confirmed plans to remove 600-700 engines for shop visits by 2026 to undergo inspection work, affecting engines powering the A320neo family, A220 and Embraer E-Jets. Last month, the engine OEM said groundings and turnaround times remain consistent with its projections.
Just before SR Technics inducted its first GTF, Embraer subsidiary OGMA opened a new GTF facility in Portugal in July, where it expects to service 240 engines annually by 2030.
The Aviation Week Network’s Fleet & MRO Forecast projects a strong long-term aftermarket for the GTF program, which will compete in the narrowbody engine market with the CFM Leap engine. By 2033, the forecast estimates that 6,518 engine units will be in-service, and the aftermarket for that year will be worth around $12.9 billion.
