Podcast: Inside MRO Dives Deep Into AI

Aviation Week editors Lee Ann Shay, Lindsay Bjerregaard and James Pozzi preview the November issue of Inside MRO, which features an in-depth look at artificial intelligence applications in the world of aircraft maintenance.

Find out more about Aviation Week Intelligence Network's 2026 Fleet & MRO Forecast here

Subscribe Now

Don't miss a single episode. Subscribe to Aviation Week's MRO Podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

Discover all of our podcasts at aviationweek.com/podcasts.

AI-Generated Transcript

Lee Ann Shay: Welcome to the MRO Podcast. Today's topic, artificial intelligence use in the aviation aftermarket. It's more than a buzzword. AI is being used in multiple ways to glean efficiencies and results. I'm Lee Ann Shay, executive editor for MRO and Business Aviation for Aviation Week and editor of Inside MRO. And joining me today to discuss AI are my colleagues, Lindsay Bjerregaard, who is the managing editor of MRO, and James Pozzi, our MRO editor for the EMEA region. Lindsay and James, welcome to the podcast. Lindsay, you wrote Inside MRO's November cover story on AI use in MRO. How is investment in AI and the pace of adoption changing?

Lindsay Bjerregaard: Sure. So I guess what I wanted to start out with was to just talk a little bit about the methodology for the article. So we have basically AI-related panels at every single one of our MRO events or aero engines events. So I've essentially been collecting information all year long for this, but from everything that I've heard all year long, it seems like all of the airlines, the OEMs, the MROs that are affiliated with airlines, they all have developed pretty concrete use cases already, multiple use cases at that. And MROs now are starting to work on their own use cases. But in terms of the pace of adoption, one of the sources that I spoke with was Oliver Wyman in their 2025 MRO survey, they asked some of the respondents about AI. So their results showed that AI adoption is up. The number of aftermarket stakeholders who believe their value expectations from AI investments are being met or exceeded, has grown significantly. And one thing that I thought was interesting as well is that their survey showed companies are now starting to form dedicated AI teams. So we're definitely starting to see that at some of the larger companies like the airline and MRO groups, but I don't want to spoil too much, so you can find out more about those numbers and things in the article as well.

Lee Ann Shay: Sounds good. Let's talk about how the industry specifically is using AI. Lindsay, would you highlight a few examples? I know there's many, but would you point out a few?

Lindsay Bjerregaard: I'm going to break it down into a few categories where we seem to be seeing the most use cases. The first is text and image recognition to quickly process paperwork and data. So this could be everything from using AI to process maintenance logs that a technician is putting together to searching records about leased engines and things like that. One that's been going on in the MRO industry for a long time, but has also sort of spilled over into different categories as well, is analyzing data for predictive maintenance, for maintenance planning and scheduling. So this could be everything from an airline putting together its maintenance schedules and figuring out when an aircraft or an engine needs to go to the shop to optimizing inventory and things like that. We're also seeing use cases where companies are pairing AI with other technologies like robots or drones to improve visual inspections. And then lastly, this one kind of ties into the workforce concerns we're always hearing about, but using AI to essentially pool what people call tribal knowledge and documentation in one place so that all of the stakeholders can find it quickly and easily and putting tools at the fingertips of technicians so that they can ask questions and get answers fast in the hangar.

Lee Ann Shay: Do you get a sense that more companies are developing the AI applications in-house or are they relying on external sources to do it?

Lindsay Bjerregaard: So I think it's kind of a mix of both. It depends on a company's internal resources, their budgets and their needs. So for example, Air France-KLM has been building a lot of stuff. They've got a big team working on use cases. I think they have more than 80 that they've been working on at this point, but some of the independent MROs looking more at how can we partner with outside companies to do this correctly. So a lot of the AI experts I talked to actually highlighted the importance of allowing employees at their company to experiment with AI tools and to come up with some of the best use cases. So Boeing, Air France-KLM and Safran are all doing this successfully creating a sandbox for employees to play around in. And then as far as building in-house or using third-party tools, opinions really seem to differ, but a lot of the experts, including at some of those big companies, recommended partnering with big AI providers like Google or Microsoft to sort of industrialize the ideas that they've come up with for how that technology can be used in MRO. Because at the end of the day, building a new large language model in-house from scratch is a really big undertaking. So I think it makes sense in a lot of those cases to partner with somebody else.

Lee Ann Shay: Well, lots of creativity in the industry. James, you wrote several other features in Inside MRO that were not related to AI, any that you'd like to highlight?

James Pozzi: Of course, starting with Africa. So airline insight. We have Ethiopian Airlines. I spoke with the CEO of the airline recently, that's Tassew Woldehanna. And he oversees an airline with the largest fleet in Africa now more than 150-plus aircraft there of course, as well as having a big airline. Ethiopian of course are a major player in Africa in the MRO space. And he talks to me about their ambitious plans to establish themselves as an MRO leader, not just in Africa but also outside of the continent. I mean this is not easy for many reasons. We had a recent podcast on Africa with two of our colleagues looking at this. African MRO as we've talked about, has been hampered by lack of, I guess, pan-African collaboration while also having much of its MRO activity centered on just five countries, Egypt and Morocco in North Africa towards East Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya.

And of course South Africa as well, which has a longstanding MRO presence mostly through the airline there. So there's some good questions we raised, and without giving too much away, there's a lot we touched on really across the airline, but also Africa in general. Will more shops emerge with limited or specific capability outside of those five countries. I mean Nigeria for example, has been somewhere that people have looked at for a long time to maybe emerge as some kind of MRO hub, but certainly Ethiopian has taken upon itself to partner with some of these countries as an interesting partnership. He talks about in Togo with ASKY, the airline there. And they're also looking at setting up another base outside of Ethiopia in Central Africa, also third-party work. Of course, African companies have struggled to establish that side of the business in terms of non-African carriers, but also Africa carriers will often go out of the continent as well.

They say that's usually around no more than 10% for Ethiopian third parties, but they think that's something they can really now grow given the huge capability additions we've reported on over the last five years. The CFM56, for example, big shop there in Addis Ababa, LEAP-1B of course for Boeing, given the 737 family fleet in Africa, that's quite a substantial fleet there. And of course there's new hangar expansions. And on the topic of technology, they opened a big warehouse this summer, which has invested a lot in robotics and automation and looking for predictive maintenance and digital tools is something they're going to really heavily focus on and carrying on the talk about AI, the role of AI in that will play into that discussion too. So definitely something to look out for CEO of a very interesting airline with a big maintenance apprentice as well.

Also just worth mentioning a little foray into something outside my usual comfort zone. I went to ATech new venture in Alghero on the island of Sardinia, of course, just off the coast of Italy. And as I said, not my usual beat. Not often you'll find me venture into a business or executive jet hangar. ATech, of course we know very well there are commercial MRO based in Naples, but they have done some non-commercial work before for the government, a bit of military work as well. And there was some forays into business projects before. But this I'd say is a formal move into the business aviation sector. So over time they hope to induct the main aircraft in that fleet. So you think Gulfstream, for example, Bombardier jets to name two and why they've done this, because they see Southern Europe as being underserved in this area.

Executive jets maintenance, Sardinia is growing as a destination. A lot of investment at the airport and ATech themselves estimate that there are around I think 4,000 private aircraft operating in the continent alone. That's Europe, of course. So the plan for now is to run as a commercial MRO and through to 2027. That's narrowbody jets, 737s and A320s. Both hangars they now occupy in Alghero were formerly operated by defunct Italian airlines. There was Air Italy and Meridiana, who also defunct now. That's the plan for now. And I spoke with some of their executive leadership team and they'll be able to give you a bit more insight into, I guess how business aviation fits into the wider portfolio, which of course is very much commercially dominated. And just a little plug as well, Parker Aerospace, I sat down with two of their leadership, Doug Dearly, who's group VP for Global Aftermarket Services and Support, and Mark Morani, who is VP of Global Commercial Aftermarket.

And they gave some interesting insights for an interview as well about I guess how Meggitt fits into their portfolio, the number of parts they would look to add in terms of growth and what Meggitt in that portfolio has brought into Parker since 2022. Now obviously that transaction that size took a long time to formalize, but that seems to be helping them move in the right direction in terms of their commercial revenue share. Of course, Parker have a big presence in military as well as we know. So yeah, some interesting insights there too. And you can see that in the MRO chat section of Inside MRO.

Lee Ann Shay: Thank you, James. Well, clearly we've got a lot of really good content in Inside MRO's November issue. And going back to the AI discussion, I think one of my key takeaways is that covering going to our MRO and aero engines events and just reading about AI and MRO across the year, the focus on data has been essential, which is not a surprise, but central to all of this being successful is having good data and reporting in the same way, which has required a lot of MROs to really look at modernizing their back ends and aligning systems and some of that non-glamorous stuff. But that seems to be a really key point. Lindsay, any thoughts on that?

Lindsay Bjerregaard: I mean, we talk about it in all of the AI discussions. You can read more in the article about that. But I wanted to just kind of talk about some of the hesitancy still that people have with AI. We know what we've heard is people are worried about the accuracy and the article has some interesting perspectives that suggest that at least for some use cases, AI can actually be more accurate than humans. However, there's also been discussion about how people need to come to a better understanding of what types of things AI is good for, where it's less ideal, or where it's not even needed at all. Right? So generally it seems like the consensus seems to be that AI is really good when you use it as an administrative assistant for tasks that are repetitive that require ingesting a lot of text, a lot of data, but for some things it's really just not necessary.

There's other technologies that do the same stuff. So I wanted to just point out a quote from Michael Williams who is a data and AI strategy associate technical fellow at Boeing, at the MRO Systems Integration Summit in April. He was talking about how people will see incorrect information coming from an AI and say, well, I never would've made that mistake with a calculator. But in that case, he said, you probably should have just used a calculator to begin with instead of AI. And I really got a kick out of that. And because here at Aviation Week over the summer, we put together a team to look at best practices and potential use for an internal AI tool that our parent company has developed. And during our experimentation with that, one of the team members actually tried to use that AI tool for some basic math and it got it wrong. So at the end of the day, right, you have to utilize it for the use cases that make sense. You always need to be checking the output because it does get things wrong. So that's just something to really keep in mind there.

Lee Ann Shay: That is a very practical tip. Thank you for that. So Lindsay, James, thank you for the insights. We've run out of time, but I encourage all of you to check out Inside MRO's November issue. Thank you to Cory Hitt for producing this podcast. And don't miss the next episode by subscribing to the MRO podcast. Wherever you listen and one last request, please consider leaving us a star rating or writing a review. Thank you so much.