Qantas is open to bringing in more third-party heavy maintenance work, and the carrier believes it offers significant advantages despite the lower labor costs of Asian MRO competitors.
The airline has traditionally not handled much third-party maintenance, said Paul Crawford, head of base maintenance for Qantas, at the MRO Australasia conference on March 11. However, in the past 3-4 years it has “started to branch out into third-party opportunities.”
Crawford stressed that the Qantas fleet remains the top priority, and other customers would only be accommodated if there are vacant slots. But when the carrier sees opportunities, it will look to fill unused capacity.
There has been growing interest from other airlines in having work done by Qantas, Crawford said. The carrier is getting “more and more enquiries” from airlines that have not approached Qantas before, including some major players.
This is partly due to increased airline service to Brisbane, where Qantas has its main heavy maintenance base for its Airbus A330s and Boeing 737s. It also shows that some airlines are looking beyond the traditional MRO third-party markets, said Crawford.
Qantas so far has only one significant third-party heavy maintenance customer. It performs heavy structural checks on Hawaiian Airlines A330s.
Crawford admits that many Southeast Asian countries and MRO operators have a labour cost advantage over Australia. The airline’s “unit costs are not going to be comparable to MROs in the Asian region - that’s a given,” he said.
However, Qantas has greater efficiency in many cases and can offer reduced turn-time for heavy maintenance jobs, Crawford said. Cutting days or even a week off maintenance visits can result in a “revenue gain that far outweighs the unit cost difference.”
This is a valuable benefit to airlines, if they look at the business case as a whole rather than focusing just on labor costs, said Crawford. Airlines need to “factor in what efficiencies [MRO providers] can bring to the customer.”
Qantas has also increased its apprentice hiring over the past 3-4 years. It now has about 130 apprentices working across the group, with 77 based in Brisbane, Crawford said. It has lifted its hiring rate to about 15-20 per year.
