Poll: Should OEMs be required to revise maintenance manuals to accommodate short-term parking or idling?

With thousands of commercial aircraft in idle condition or in short- or longer-term storage due to the COVID-19 crisis, airlines and MROs are being forced to adapt their workflows to keep aircraft in healthy condition indefinitely until operations can begin returning to normal.

According to Aviation Week Fleet Data Services, approximately 9,000 aircraft are now in short-term parked status and more than 3,000 aircraft have gone through the process of being put in storage. For American Airlines, which now has approximately 300 idled aircraft parked across its network in Mobile, Alabama; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Roswell, New Mexico, the situation builds on what the airline was already dealing concerning grounded Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.

Discover how the MAX has provided an unfortunate training ground for American Airlines on aircraft storage.

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Another challenge Longhurst points to is a lack of maintenance manual guidance for short-term parking or idling. “The maintenance manual right now seems to be tailored for more longer-term mothballing of aircraft, whereas we’re in a situation where different areas of the world may want to reactivate fleets more quickly, they may want to be ready and they may not want to face large reactivation packages just to get aircraft back flying again,” he says.

Read the full article - Airlines Tackle Parked Fleet Challenges During COVID-19 Crisis.

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