Global MROs

A year ago I blogged about Hub MROs (click here for blog). ADAT was advocating this one stop shop as the wave of the future. One year later in the same venue, The Middle East Airlines Engineering and Maintenance conference, Mubadala Aerospace the parent company of ADAT and SRT put forward the concept of a Global MRO. Mr. Abdulla Shadid, Manager Business Development, Mubadala Aerospace said in the keynote address of the conference "The days of the independent non aligned MROs are over". These are powerful words and they were echoed by Turkish Technic.

So what is an aligned MRO, well it does not exist as one physical entity, but rather several MROs offering different services aligned together (not independent) as an example ADAT, SANAD, SRT and several Joint Ventures with OEMs (Landing gear, engines etc..) offering services jointly. Mubadala is trying to create a leading edge concept by aligning all its holdings and so is Turkish Technic. This is made possible through leveraging large aircraft orders by Etihad and deep pockets of Mubadala, and THY orders .

This alignment is not as easy as it sounds there are several challenges facing this and they have not changed from last year:
1 Human capital, there is a world shortage of technicians and releasing engineers and this has not been
   resolved in the UAE and many other countries in the region. Not enough trained Emaratis are available to
   run these JVs and will not be available for a long time;
2 There is a tremendous management challenge in aligning several JVs and entities to work together to
   provide a competitive single all encompassing quotation to an airline. The tendency is for each one to go its own way.

Is it impossible?  of course not; is it needed? we will have to see. In the mean time and I beg to differ, the Independent MROs will survive and thrive. Not every airline wants all the services or wants all the services from one entity and are happy to deal with an efficient independent MRO.

Will this concept catch up and become the norm of the industry, we will need to wait ad see.
The Independent MROs are here to stay.