The challenges of Maintenance
With the first rays of morning sunshine, she woke up in her bed. It was New Year’s Day and, still drowsy, Christine decided to get up and make a coffee to start the year full of energy. While she was in the kitchen, she turned on the television. They were reporting on New Year’s celebrations in Brazil… People dressed in white on the beach making offerings to Iemanjá, asking for protection and peace for the year ahead.
She recalled her last trip to Brazil. Christine Ourmières-Widener is the new CEO of TAP Air Portugal and recently travelled to this country to visit TAP Maintenance & Engineering Brazil (M&E Brazil), an associated company with 500 employees that provides aircraft maintenance support to third parties and for the Airbus A330 aircraft in TAP’s fleet.
At that moment, she knew that TAP had committed to divesting this unit as part of the restructuring plan approved by Brussels in December 2021, and that concerned her.
The importance of this restructuring was clearly reflected in the words of Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for Competition: “the restructuring plan has been approved and will ensure that TAP [will follow] the path to long-term viability”. She also knew that the maintenance unit in Lisbon had been operating at full capacity in recent years to maintain, almost exclusively, TAP’s aircraft fleet. The order for the new Airbus aircraft (14 A330neo and 39 A320/21neo), which began to enter service gradually in 2017, brought additional pressure on this maintenance unit.
Christine felt she was facing a major challenge. Excluding third-party work, the M&E Brazil unit had carried out between 8 and 12 C-Check inspections of TAP’s older Airbus A330 aircraft during the IATA winters (October to March) from 2016 to 2020, versus 1 to 4 inspections in Lisbon.
“It is true that newer aircraft require less inspection time, but with the TAP M&E Lisbon hangars at maximum capacity and without being able to rely on the unit in Brazil, how will TAP be able to ensure the maintenance of its fleet in the future?” she wondered.
Given the demanding quality requirements for inspections, the current infrastructure, the physical facilities and the human resources allocated to each maintenance event, how will it be possible, in the short and
medium term, to keep to the planned schedule for maintaining the TAP fleet without delays in returning aircraft to operations?
