ATLANTA—In a supply and production-constrained environment, maintenance providers are finding themselves challenged to get parked or retired aircraft back into service. 

“Today we’ve been experiencing the activation of aircraft that have been in storage for a long, long time due to the pandemic,” MRO Holdings Chief Revenue & Strategy Officer Bill Tiffany told attendees at Aviation Week’s MRO conference in Atlanta. “We’re seeing consumers return to air travel in a very aggressive manner, which is great for all of us. Certainly, from a heavy maintenance side and frankly from a material consumption standpoint, the real challenge has been some of these aircraft were never meant to fly again.”

Pointing to constraints in production and manufacturing with OEMs, and supply chain constraints around the world, Tiffany noted the challenge is one of the latest in a rapidly evolving environment.

“The bottleneck moves, which is really frustrating,” he said. “A couple of years ago in COVID it truly was getting enough of the parts that you need to perform the work and getting your hands on that in a timely manner.” 

On the airline side, returning those aircraft to service safely and in time to respond to surging demand is critical. For Mesa Airlines, it was a decision to delay a lot of heavy maintenance and C-checks—because of the unknowns of the pandemic—that created their bottleneck. 

“[We were] parking the aircraft, we didn’t know if we were going to fly them again,” Supply Chain VP John Bacon Jr. said. “And then our bottleneck materialized when all of a sudden, we had far too many aircraft going through heavy maintenance at the same time. Then all those challenges of materials, they get compounded, and you just have to deal with it. I think at one time we had four lines of heavy maintenance going at different MRO facilities.”

He added, “It was a lot of lessons learned that decisions you make today have second and third order effects tomorrow.”

Looking ahead, the panel of airlines and suppliers said strong relationships and communication with suppliers were key—along with investments in technology for better demand forecast and modeling, as well as automation. 

“We’re certainly really looking at our tools to make sure that we evolve them ... no longer can we just rely on past historical demand,” Alaska Airlines MD Aircraft Supply Chain Operations and Material Management Alex Gorinsky said. “We’ve got to anticipate that demand and where it’s going to be needed, as we look at expanding our maintenance footprint and our inventory holding position areas across the network. We’ve got to be smarter at it, and we’re looking at investing in those tools to do so.”