Having its own MRO division gives FAI's charter and ambulance businesses an advantage, as well as generating its own revenues.
It is not just in the management and planning of its air-ambulance flights that FAI is relying on innovative thinking and meticulous attention to detail to keep the company moving forward.
The business’ charter and MRO divisions have also seen significant changes in the post-pandemic period, with some eye-catching decisions apparently paying big dividends.
“In the last two years we went through a transition, and we’re focusing now only on ultra-long-range flights,” aviation manager Georg Gruber says, during a media day held at the company’s headquarters in late May. “We got rid of all our Learjet 60s. Now we have a fleet of five Bombardier Global Express and one Challenger 604.”
FAI Rent-a-Jet, the charter division, saw 3640 hr. of utilization across its fleet in 2023—up from 2676 hr. in 2022, with revenues 22% up over the same period. Patterns of use shifted as flights began to pick up post-pandemic in 2021, leading to the decision to concentrate on longer-range operations.
“In 2021, the UK was our main [destination],” Gruber says. “In 2022 it was still quite a lot of Europe, but the U.S. flights picked up: we had 22 flights. And in 2023 we completely changed our way of thinking, and we performed a tremendous number of flights to the U.S. It’s definitely our number-one market.”
The new thinking Gruber refers to involved not just divesting the shorter-range aircraft, but reconceptualizing how to sell flights.
Using a model that appears to be based on the ambulance division’s operating concept, FAI’s charter team now prioritizes combination flights: looking for customers to pick up at, or near, a one-way flight’s destination, then keeping the aircraft moving.
“We constructed a system with the Globals where we can perfectly connect all our one-way [flights],” he says. “Of course we’re offering returns; but our main focus is on one-ways. In the last 12 or 16 months, we never flew ferry home.”
This allows the firm to play to another of the strengths that the ambulance division has pioneered: flights in to and out of destinations other carriers may find too difficult or too challenging.
Word is spreading.
“Everyone who has a really tricky request is calling us,” Gruber says. “We’re talking about destinations like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela—even Russia at the moment. I think the only destination we can’t fly is probably Yemen: maybe North Korea, but I think even that would be possible, with the right client in the back.
“We can do that, first of all, [because] we have a very good relationship with our insurance provider,” he continues. “Second we have the knowledge—we have the contacts to get the permits.
Sometimes we need help from the client—most of the time there’s a government behind [a difficult flight], or an NGO [non-governmental organization], or an affiliate company of the NGO.”
That the company has its own in-house maintenance business is “the biggest advantage we have,” Gruber says, with staff able to fly to an aircraft with a technical issue, minimizing any down time. But the MRO division, FAI Technik, is struggling with the same issues the rest of the sector is seeing.
Delays with spare parts are a long-standing challenge across the sector, FAI chairman Siegfried Axtmann says, because business aircraft are not manufactured in sufficient numbers, or flown at such high rates of utilization, that there is a well-established market in used components. To address this challenge, FAI began to scrap its own end-of-life aircraft to use for spares for the active fleet.
Since taking this decision the firm has broken down four Learjet 60s, two Challenger 604s and one Global Express.
“Until [the pandemic] ended, this had no big impact into our numbers, because we scrapped the aircraft only for our own purposes,” Axtmann says. “But we now aggressively sell them to third parties, because we have enough of them. No matter if the third party is a competitor or not—we just sell them.” He says that the firm’s inventory includes GE CF24 engines, which it is willing to rent out or sell, as well as APUs (auxiliary power units) and other hard-to-source items.
The MRO division expanded its footprint in February of 2023 with the acquisition of the insolvent Beechcraft Berlin Aviation’s business at Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport. The deal saw FAI retain around 90% of BBA’s workforce, and Axtmann acknowledges that a shortage of skilled personnel is presently the main brake on further expansion.
“It’s very difficult to increase your workforce—there’s no supply of engineers on the market,” he says. And while it is a boon for the charter and ambulance divisions to be based at the 24-7 Albrecht Dürer Airport in Nuremberg, the fact that FAI’s is the only MRO there does not help ease the engineering recruitment challenge.
Along with efforts to recruit from elsewhere, Axtmann notes that FAI is building relationships with schools and universities, aiming to “present FAI Technik as an attractive employer” to the next generation of potential employees.
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