How The Aftermarket Is Handling OEM Problems

The cycle of new-aircraft delivery delays and early service-life problems driving demand for support of older assets is a major reason that the commercial aftermarket is booming. But for airframe and engine manufacturers, rising demand for everything from shop capacity to spare parts is adding pressure to satisfy MRO needs amid their push to address shortfalls of new products.

In a perfect world, an airframe or engine life cycle follows a predictable pattern. Service entry comes on a predictable date and is followed by an extended stretch of low-maintenance demand. After this so-called honeymoon period, routine preventative maintenance starts—heavy checks for airframes and shop visits for engines—that manufacturers are prepared to support.

Today’s world is far from perfect. Myriad issues have backed up production lines, leading to extensive delivery delays. Steady demand for passenger and cargo lift has forced operators to reshuffle fleet and network plans, leading to extended lives—and more maintenance—for older aircraft.

Compounding the issue are unexpected durability problems on some new product lines. This has created headaches for affected manufacturers who did not anticipate their newest products needing so much aftermarket support so soon.

Add in global supply chain issues that extend far beyond aerospace, and the result is a long list of frustrated operators and third-party MRO providers.

“HEICO’s biggest challenges with the OEMs, like the rest of the industry, are inconsistencies in both pricing and availability of components and parts, lack of communication and customer service,” says Jim O’Sullivan, vice president of sales and business development for Europe, Middle East and Africa. “These challenges make it that much more difficult to plan our turnaround times and deliver on time to our customers.”

At Aviation Week Network’s AeroEngines Europe conference in September, Lufthansa Technik reported difficulties in receiving quick answers from OEMs on parts repair developments while LOT Polish Airlines expressed frustration with delays and price increases.

“We hate the scenario where we all go to a restaurant, the OEM sets up the menu, the MROs choose what we’re going to eat and the airlines pay the bill,” said Maciej Maciejewicz, head of powerplant at LOT. “We all know it’s very hard to put any pressure on the OEM, so that has to be industrywide pressure.”

Scott Symington, chief commercial officer at AJW Group, tells Inside MRO that it is challenging to balance the need for reliable OEM support with the flexibility operators and MROs require to manage costs and efficiency. “The rising cost of materials with catalog list prices has led to greater regionality in MRO sourcing. OEMs should be working to address capacity constraints by sharing services globally and collaborating with customers and logistics partners,” he says.

ENGINE HEADACHES

Much of the frustration stems from engine availability. Durability issues with Pratt & Whitney’s PW1000G geared turbofan prompted Pratt to accelerate shop-capacity growth for the still-new engine family and develop upgrades to several problematic parts that were causing premature engine removals.

An unrelated problem with contaminated powder metal (PM) in critical parts forced Pratt to develop a plan to inspect affected engines and shorten the parts’ lives. Already faced with full MRO shops because of the durability issues, engine turnaround times soared to 250-300 days as inspections ramped up in early 2024. Pratt and its partners are working to reduce the turn times, but the PM problem is expected to result in 300-350 aircraft on the ground (AOG) at any given time through 2026.

Shop capacity remains an issue, but the primary factor in easing operators’ pain is getting enough full-life parts to MRO shops to replace ones flagged as part of the inspection plan and in need of replacement to avoid repeated off-wing inspections. Though the issue was discovered in 2021, parts production lead times meant Pratt could not provide enough full-life parts to its new-engine assembly lines until late 2023. MRO shops fell in line behind new production.

“The AOG levels have stabilized, and we’ve got to continue to bring those down over the back half of this year and have them decrease on a steady, sustainable level,” Chris Calio, president of Pratt parent RTX, said at a recent Barclays investor conference. “The most critical enabling part of that is MRO . . . and the key enabler for that is material flow.”

With new-engine output rising to meet airframe manufacturers’ forecasts, unanticipated demand for in-service engines means parts production plans must change. But raw material and production capacity are limited. In Pratt’s case, the dilemma led to a reduction in spares production for some legacy engines, notably the IAE V2500, for a short time in 2024.

Even with the new-delivery delays, current-generation narrowbody engine programs are rapidly maturing. For both Pratt and CFM International, that means ramping up support for the PW1000G and Leap families, respectively, while handling still strong demand for the V2500 and CFM56.

The Leap engine program’s ramp is the fastest of any commercial engine. While the family has not seen the same level of durability problems or parts manufacturing issues as its Pratt counterpart, both have hit the Leap program. CFM has responded with redesigned parts and retrofits to address the most substantial issues. New, more durable high pressure turbine blades and a reverse bleed system to address fuel nozzle coking have been introduced for the Leap 1A, with Leap 1B variants on tap for release this year.

GROWING SERVICES NETWORK

In the meantime, the first of decades of scheduled shop visits are steadily approaching, and CFM is readying its network.

CFM’s Leap network includes 13 third-party shops. Five of them—Air France Industries KLM Engineering & Maintenance, Delta TechOps, Lufthansa Technik, ST Engineering and StandardAero—are Premier MRO shops with CFM-branded service agreements. These shops “have a higher access of training and support than maybe a standard license holder, and they’re competing in the open ecosystem, along with CFM and external shops,” says Becky Johnson, GE Aerospace’s marketing director for CFM commercial programs. But “they also have access to proprietary overhaul and repair technologies,” she continues.

Because the Premier MROs, the OEM and external engine shops are all competing, “the operator has more choices that help them optimize their costs, help them figure out where they get the best induction slots, turnaround time and workscopes,” Johnson adds.

Proprietary repairs that Premier MROs receive from CFM is a “huge value,” says Alaska Airlines’ Ken Newton, supply chain management engine and lease management director. He urges those MROs “to talk to each other from a technical perspective” and share learnings to improve the engine’s performance.

Delta TechOps does share tooling issues, manual clarification and other teething issues to the OEM, which spreads it across the Premier network “so we can learn together and accelerate that [learning curve] sooner than later,” says Basil Papayoti, vice president for commercial MRO. For instance, he says Delta has been working with StandardAero “to help each other with our ramp ups and industrialization of certain pieces.”

Premier members do collaborate on technical matters, “but I would like to point out commercially, we are competing very aggressively” against each other, says Will Pitcher, senior vice president of sales and marketing for StandardAero. “Anyone who’s been through a [request for proposal (RFP)] process so far for the Leap will probably attest, right?”

One company betting on collaboration is ITP Aero. ITP used to be part of Rolls-Royce but was spun out in September 2022 as an independent design, manufacturing and services company. That independence has two big benefits, CEO Eva Azoulay says. One is that “there aren’t many independent players that could help and work with all of the OEMs around the world,” she notes.

The other is that ITP was focused on engine development and defense MRO under Rolls and now it has branched out to commercial MRO. “MRO defense was our mandate in support of the Spanish defense forces, but growing MRO for commercial aviation, bringing all of our knowledge and capability from the operations manufacturing” of large engines was not part of the mandate, she says.

Azoulay sees that as a “big shift” and says ITP is considering mergers and acquisitions “to really develop that life-cycle propulsion service capability,” which would include full engine overhauls.

ITP is a risk-sharing partner with Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney, Pratt & Whitney Canada, GE and Honeywell. She describes those risk-sharing partnerships like a marriage that needs to navigate changes and challenges together. They work together to develop technology. “We’re tied at the hip,” she says. But like any marriage, “you don’t always agree,” she says. “Things don’t always go exactly as planned, but the fact that you’re committed and that you’re aligned to the success” means working through challenges together.

ITP’s partnerships with the OEMs ties its success to theirs. “We want them to succeed. Our success is intricately tied to the success of all the platforms that we are a partner and support,” Azoulay says.

“Being able to enable capacity and capability in the aftermarket is a key way to keep those programs successful and thriving,” she adds.

AIRFRAMER PERSPECTIVES

During Aviation Week Network’s recent MRO Latin America conference, several OEMs acknowledged the aftermarket’s frustrations and spoke about how their companies are working to mitigate headaches.

Cesar Gomez Tavera, Airbus’ regional head of customer support for Latin America and Caribbean, noted that while the airframer is planning to ramp up production on the A320 fleet about 50% by 2027, it is also concerned with ensuring that it does not jeopardize its ability to simultaneously provide services support for the active fleet.

“I truly believe it’s not a one-size-fits-all [situation],” he said. “There’s plan A, B, C and D, and depending on the customer and the situation, I need to provide you the four alternatives for you to decide which one to take or which one fits your specific situation.” While he noted that Airbus has global warehouses to support spare parts availability, this is not always sufficient, so the company is also looking at used part market opportunities and manufacturing parts locally.

Frank Stevens, Embraer’s vice president of global MRO centers, said the post-pandemic market has been difficult to navigate as the company tries to balance the needs of its aircraft and aftermarket services customers.

“It’s a race to save money,” he said. “We provide services to our customers at the lowest rate that we can to sustain a business, but when outside resources are causing constraints on us . . . it’s very hard for us to make sure that we can deliver on time as scheduled, and a lot of times when we do that as MROs, even in the OEM world, we have to balance it.”  

Embraer is seeing strong demand for airframe services, particularly on its E175, which remains popular among U.S. regional carriers. Several optimization projects, such as a major push to go paperless, have helped the Brazilian manufacturer increase capacity at its primary North American airframe facility in Nashville, Tennessee, without any physical changes. Nashville now runs nine heavy check lines. Macon, Georgia, boasts six more.

Both facilities used to set aside capacity for drop-in work, but the need for scheduled checks became too great to justify the strategy. Embraer is now setting up a third facility, at Perot Field Alliance Airport in Fort Worth. The first phase, set to open by midyear, will see an existing, two-bay hangar converted for Embraer. The longer-term plan is to build a new, six-bay hangar.

The new facility will be purpose-built to handle the larger E-Jet E2 as well as the older variants.

“In the short term, it’s going to give us capacity to take on two more airplanes,” Stevens says. “In the long term, it’s going to give us capacity for 6-8, depending on how the business plan rolls out. We’re hoping to keep the temporary hangar so we have a total of eight [lines], and we’re really meeting the demand that we have now, because we’re full at all 15 lines that we have right now between Nashville and Macon.”  

Boeing’s recent focus has been on improving production quality and organizationwide safety protocols—the result of a series of high-profile issues that date back to the 737 MAX fatal accidents in 2018 and 2019. But its aftermarket support efforts are not suffering as a result. Boeing Global Services generated 57% of its $19.9 billion in 2024 revenue from commercial work—a slight decline compared with 2023 but a 3% uptick from 2022.

The company’s focus on safety is generating tangential benefits for the in-service fleet. The ramp-up of its safety management system is seeing more fleet data compiled and analyzed, which is helping flag potential safety issues such as problematic parts before they trigger incidents.

Boeing also has worked with the FAA to use artificial intelligence to glean trends from service difficulty reports (SDR). While an SDR contains useful information, not all of it is structured, and the FAA has struggled to generate meaningful conclusions from the millions of records filed.

In a set of trials, Boeing used various machine learning models to analyze thousands of SDRs, focusing on “problem description” fields, which contain unstructured text, to flag depressurization events. The most promising model’s accuracy was 95%, a study on the trials found.

The results are promising in areas ranging from predictive maintenance to flagging precursors to in-service incidents.

“A long-term future goal to work toward is drawing meaningful connections between observations across all phases of an aircraft’s life cycle: design, production, operation and maintenance,” the Boeing-authored study said. “Ideally, this would position safety experts across government and industry in a forward-looking, predictive posture that allows for greater prevention of safety events before they can occur.”

FUTURE PREDICTIONS

While Airbus and Boeing are showing progress on the delivery ramp-up front, it will not be enough to offset existing shortages. Given the post-downturn track record, doubts linger about whether revised delivery forecasts will become reality.

“We think aircraft are still going to be in short supply,” Air Lease Corp. President John Plueger said. “The manufacturers are not going to achieve nearly the rate of production that they want to achieve, or they would need to make up for the last several years. We’re quite convinced we’re in this for a fairly long period of time.”

Some MROs say they also are not seeing many signs of improvement from the OEM side.

“We are not seeing any appreciable improvements in aftermarket cooperation from the OEMs,” HEICO’s O’Sullivan says. “Moreover, the uncertainty around tariffs, sanctions and possible trade wars will not only impact the availability and price of raw materials and parts but will also drive more inconsistencies in price escalations and delivery times.”

In response, O’Sullivan says HEICO’s supply chain team is “constantly looking for multiple and alternative sources for piece parts and components to minimize the impact of a single OEM source.” It is also turning to parts manufacturer approval and designated engineering representative repair capabilities to better control its delivery commitments.

“Aircraft delivery delays and in-service issues are putting further pressure on MROs, making effective inventory strategies more important than ever,” AJW’s Symington says. “AJW is taking a proactive approach by leveraging its size and scale for strategic purchasing and collaborating with suppliers to mitigate the impact of price fluctuations and shortages. By building inventory pools ahead of potential pricing reviews, we’re ensuring accessibility and distribution of inventory to our regional customers.

“Looking ahead, greater collaboration, transparency and innovation in the aftermarket space will be key to overcoming these challenges and ensuring a more resilient and efficient industry,” he adds.