MRO 2008 Show News Briefing - April 7, 2008 - (Page 10)

MRO ‘Eliminate the Exceptions’—24/7 Ordered parts to the loading dock in four and some from vendors. An airline with hours? Boeing now does so about 80% of Goodrich wheels and brakes on its Boeing the time. The target? 97%. “The goal is to jets might elect to get its parts from eliminate the exceptions,” says Mark Owen, Goodrich, Owen says, or let Boeing Boeing Commercial Aviation Services ma- handle them. The 2006 purchase of terial management vp. Aviall has added engine parts Concurrently, Boeing to the mix. “We are becomaims to reduce ordering ing more of a full service maacross the board by making terial provider,” Owens says. sure customers have the His orders operation at maintenance parts they need Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport before they need them. So runs 24/7 around the clock, Boeing supplies an initial every day of the year. Cubiprovisioning list when a cusStriving to deliver parts faster. cle walls have been radically tomer buys an airplane. But “they sometimes think that Boeing is too shaved and staff members (whose activity conservative and we recommend more parts is also monitored by computer) furnished than they actually need,” Owen says, “so with trouble lights for flashing colleagues they scale it down or scale it up or what- with calls for help when the search for a ever their own experience with an airplane particular part gets bogged down. “We wish we could forecast and predict type might be.” every single part,” Owens says. “The realAnd it’s back to the Boeing order desk. CAS manages supply of some 500,000 ity is we still have issues that occur on different parts, some from Boeing itself airplanes that we do not predict.” Boeing built 744 B-52 bombers. B-52s Rock On The B-52 made its first flight in 1954, and Boeing built a staggering 744 of the 488,000-lb, 8,800-nmi, eight-engine Stratofortress bombers before delivery of the final B-52H in October 1962. The Air Force pegs the cost of the aircraft at some $40 billion in 1998 dollars, and although nearly 90% of the original B-52s have been retired, the service has a great interest in keeping the remaining four score bombers up to snuff. Upgrading their capabilities is of course of key importance. “We’re not just sustaining these platforms, but changing their missions entirely,” says Wichita, Kans.based Scot Oathout, Boeing’s B-52 program manager. Two Key B-52 upgrade initiatives are the Avionics Midlife Improvement and Electronic Countermeasure Integration efforts carried out by the Support Systems unit of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. “AMI replaces the heart and soul of the B-52’s offensive system with a 21stcentury system,” Oathout says. Navigation upgrades alone involved a six-year effort. ECMI focuses on defensive capabilities like radar jamming. During the first Gulf War, the USAF says, B-52s delivered 40% of all the weapons dropped by coalition forces. This included the longest strike mission in the history of aerial warfare, when B-52s from Barksdale AFB in Louisiana delivered cruise missiles during a 35-hour, nonstop combat sortie. B-52s are maintained at Barksdale, at Minot AFB in North Dakota, and at the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center. Those B-52 engines, by the way, are TF33-P-3/103s by Pratt & Whitney. Boeing Maintenance Optimization One of the two dozen major MRO offerings at Boeing CAS is the simply named Maintenance Program Optimization. Call it what you will, it’s Boeing’s way of carrying the MRO ball for the start-up airlines feeding so much of current world traffic growth. “There are a lot of airlines, startups especially, who have come to us in the last couple of years,” says maintenance optimization chief Al Stender. “They want predictable costs and a world class engineering department. That’s exactly what Boeing assisted Maintenance Optimization and virtual engineering provides.” “We provide maintenance program planning, scheduling, engineering, including things like repairs, engineering orders, and reliability programs.” It works for older operators wishing to modernize their maintenance too, Stender says—Boeing helps them with every step of the process, benchmarking current operations and even digitizing the paper records. “We’re with the customer every step of the way to achieve safety, efficiency and cost reduction.” IDS Consolidating at Oklahoma City Boeing IDS is consolidating its MRO activities in Oklahoma City, moving Support Systems staff into a new four-story, 200,000 sq ft building this month. They support the U.S. Air Force at Tinker AFB, site of the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center, which is the largest ALC in the nation. Aircraft maintained by IDS at Tinker include E-3 and E-4 AWACS jets, KC-135 tankers, and B-1/B-2 and B-52 bombers. “This move will allow us to better serve our customer and the warfighter,” said Boeing site director Ben Robinson. “The site consolidation allows us to leverage common investment, lessons learned and proven customer solutions.” 10 www.aviationweek.com/shownews Sponsored by The Boeing Company. April, 2008 http://www.aviationweek.com/shownews

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MRO 2008 Show News Briefing - April 7, 2008 Contents PBL and Partnerships Delta-Chromalloy PMA Reverse Engineering? Straighter, Rounder Regionals Buck the Trend Composites Loom Large Freighters and Cargo

MRO 2008 Show News Briefing - April 7, 2008

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