Fast 5: Air Spares Unlimited Tackles Landing Gear Bottlenecks

Stephanie Boccarossa is CEO of Air Spares Unlimited, an aftermarket services provider focused on landing gear, wheels and brakes. During a discussion with Aviation Week Network at the company’s Chicago headquarters, she shared perspectives on solving aftermarket bottlenecks, tapping technology for efficiencies and attracting young people to MRO careers.

What is your business focus for Air Spares Unlimited (ASU)?

We focus on the purchase and redistribution of commercial landing gear for Boeing and Airbus aircraft in the used serviceable market. Our customers like working with us because we're flexible, privately owned and we have 100% of decision making in-house, which makes it easier for the bigger companies to source landing gear. We’re really good at taking a lot of moving parts and making it simple.

With any kind of service life-limited part in the industry, you're looking at all the information you need to know to make sure that engineering is going to accept this type of product and put it on the plane. There’s a big bottleneck with evaluating assets that have [significant] records and paperwork requirements, and landing gear is one of the most difficult because it’s not just life limit; it's airworthiness directives, it’s service bulletins, it’s what went into the overhaul, and you really have to dig into records. We complete all of the back-office work that goes into evaluating landing gear and make sure that it's up to par with what should be going on an airplane, and delivering to our customers a full package of the right configuration, with suitable and sufficient records—or even over and above records—that will be acceptable to the end operator. We really lean into technology to provide transparency, so we're able to put several assets in front of an operator for evaluation, which essentially increases their purchasing power.

In the last few years, we’ve seen a fair amount of new landing gear-focused repair facilities, joint ventures and acquisitions. How has the market changed recently, and what are your expectations for the near future?

I think there has been a lot of improvement toward quality and focus on turnaround time and delivery. But there have also been some capacity strains, and turnaround times just aren’t necessarily being met in all cases. It’s definitely a butterfly effect: In 2020, it was labor shortages, which went to production shortages on new spares, which led to shops being unable to meet demand for turnaround times, and then it cascades back to the manufacturer of the sunset parts. Airplanes are flying longer, so more maintenance is needed and fewer planes are going into teardown, which means less availability of landing gear, engines and auxiliary power units. The current MRO network isn’t necessarily set up to meet the demand for MRO availability. We have ready-to-go spares to help fill capacity, but I think there’s definitely room for several more MRO players in the market to come and start filling some of that capacity, improving turnaround times.

You mentioned that ASU is using technology to provide transparency. Could you tell me more about what you’re doing on that side?

We’re leaning into technology for process and efficiency around records and evaluating landing gear. We’re pretty speedy when it comes to doing that, so we’re always looking for ways to reduce our turnaround time on evaluation of assets, or even the labor that goes into making those assets available and ready for airlines. The biggest bottleneck per class is the reliance on third-party maintenance to turn around the landing gear in a reasonable amount of time.

[Editor’s note: Boccarossa also highlighted ASU's use of ProvenAir, which offers an aircraft records management platform that generates trace history for aircraft material. You can read more about ProvenAir’s technology in Sean Broderick’s September Inside MRO article on the aftermarket’s parts integrity efforts.]

How is ASU approaching the industry’s widespread workforce challenges?

Every time I talk to somebody outside of aviation, they’re always really surprised to hear that [the aftermarket] exists—it’s the biggest little industry nobody’s ever heard of. My son asked me the other day where they were getting the materials for the Death Star that was being built in the center of space [from the Star Wars films], and those are the questions that people aren’t asking about airplanes. When people think of getting a job in aviation, there are some obvious things that you see when you get on the airplane or when you go to the airport, but we need people to be engineers, to fix parts and airplanes, and to find and trade inventory. The work that goes into what we do may not [immediately or inherently] appeal to the new workforce culture, so we need to make it more like home for them and give them tools and technology that they can use to do their jobs.

I think technology is going to be a big player in the efficiency side of the business, but we still need the incoming workforce to be knowledgeable. I started The Deb Noreen Foundation to raise money that provides scholarships for women in continuing education STEM programs. Our future dream is to also be able to provide an outlet for internship matching between the women in the foundation and companies, primarily in the aviation industry.

What’s on ASU’s future roadmap?

There are definitely big ideas and ways that we’re going to be better positioned to support the industry on a greater level than we are right now through some creative solutions that we’re coming up with internally through some creative solutions that we’re coming up with internally. I think it’s going to be really exciting for a lot of companies and a really refreshing welcome to how landing gear is being traded today when it rolls out in the future.