ON-SITE Plus: More Than Just On-Site And Near-Wing Services
ON-SITEPlus Service: MTU Maintenance delivers surgical precision to your doorstep
The mission of ON-SITEPlus services is two-fold. Either MTU’s engine experts conduct preventative maintenance work on-site or at a dedicated level 1 MTU shop within close customer reach, or as an alternative, they deploy to a grounded engine and find a solution to whatever problem is keeping it from flying.
The maintenance process starts with the initial contact with MTU. To ensure that customers around the world can hire this service without delay, MTU has set up highly qualified ON-SITEPlus service teams at locations in Brazil, Canada, the U.S., Germany, China, and Australia. An around-the-clock on-call service ensures that the teams are ready to roll as soon as a customer reports engine damage which requires immediate repairs. MTU’s customer service organizes the deployments, including all technical, logistical and customs handling.
Whenever possible, the maintenance work or repairs are done on-wing — a form of on-site service in which the engine is repaired without having to be removed from the aircraft wing first. The main advantage of this repair procedure is that it saves the cost of an engine exchange, which needs to be organized and adds up to the cost. It is also the fastest way to fix a problem.
However, some repairs can’t be done on-site and every now and then, an engine does have to come in for a hospital shop visit. During such a visit, the engine is only partly disassembled, repaired, put back together and tested. MTU Maintenance Berlin-Brandenburg, for instance, located in Ludwigsfelde just south of the German capital, already has many years of on-site service experience and expertise, and offers special docks where mechanics conduct smaller scale workscopes. Each year, its experts perform hundreds of jobs in the shop and on-site for range of engines, including GE Aerospace’s CF34 and CFM International’s CFM56.
The service portfolio that can be performed during regular on-site or near-wing deployments includes borescope inspections, minor repairs such as boro-blending on high-pressure compressors, as well as top case repairs or even the replacement of entire modules. These services can be upgraded or supplemented with additional in-shop heavy maintenance, material management, or spare engine and logistical support, if required.
Over the last four years, MTU Maintenance has been strategically expanding the capabilities and capacities of its global ON-SITEPlus network, as a way to be more flexible in the services it offers and to meet customer demands for this type of maintenance work. The fallout from the travel bans and grounding of fleets due to the outbreak of the corona virus accelerated this process and on-site repair and maintenance have become an effective tool in helping to optimize engine operations.
Today, MTU Maintenance has a total of seven locations world-wide with ON-SITEPlus service teams. MTU Maintenance Dallas, for example, is an entire location dedicated to on-site and near-wing repairs with a portfolio encompassing engines for regional, narrow-body and wide-body aircraft. In 2023, it moved to an existing 41,000 m2 (440,000 ft2) facility at Fort Worth Alliance Airport and boasts its own test cell capable of 100,000 lbs of thrust, which will help increase the depth of its workscope provisions.
Whether there is an aircraft-on-ground situation or a long-term preservation of an engine, MTU Maintenance’s ON-SITEPlus team has the expertise and infrastructure to get the job done in no-time.
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