While Avianca Airlines is restructuring, the MRO is healthy and has reached its 2025 business goals already, so it is considering growth options—and maybe evening spinning off. Jose Luis Quiros, senior VP maintenance and engineering for Avianca Holdings, discusses the business on the sidelines of the MRO Latin America event in Cartagena, Colombia.
As part of Aviaca’s restructuring and fleet downsizing, how does this affect its operation in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Columbia. Is your MRO doing several lease returns?
Yes and no. Obviously, when you return the airplanes, you have to complete the redelivery work. But this is not impacting the MRO activity in a significant way. We plan the redeliveries into the schedule. All of the redeliveries in 2019, including the records, went well—we didn’t have any issues. Obviously, that was a high number of airplanes in a short period of time, but lessors were satisfied. It does have an impact because we dedicated resources to it, so it didn’t impact our capacity for planned maintenance.
What are you planning for 2020?
We still have some redeliveries going on—but it’s going to be significantly fewer airplanes than in 2019 because that was when Avianca’s big downsizing occurred. We’ve scheduled the redeliveries into our plan so it’s scheduled as routine.
Is Avianca going to change the outstations in the various countries in which it operates?
It’s not related to the downsizing of the fleet—it’s related to the operational plan of the airline, so the restructuring of the network. For some stations, we are increasing the frequencies and for others we are decreasing the frequency. From a maintenance standpoint, we’re just adjusting the capacity. Whenever we have a lower workload, we accommodate third-party work whenever possible. We’re just rebalancing.
How much third-party MRO does Avianca MRO do?
Roughly 10-15% is third-party work but this will increase in the next three years.
In the coming three years, we should get more than 25%. The work—mostly heavy airframe maintenance--is coming by itself. At this point, customers are coming to us. Demand is growing in the region, and there aren’t enough maintenance facilities.
In your presentation at MRO Latin America, you mentioned that your hangar was about at capacity--and the region is growing. Would you consider building another hangar?
The development of another hangar, in Bogota, is approved. It would be very similar to the one we have in Medellin (which is a environmentally friendly designed hangar, certified as LEED silver). It could accommodate two widebodies or four narrowbodies. We could tender the project by the yearend.
