Preparing for Giants

United Arab Emirates flagship carrier, Emirates Airlines, anticipates the arrival of the Airbus A380 and tripling its fleet.

Dubai-based Emirates Airlines is one of the fastest-growing airlines in the world and first customer for the "super jumbo" Airbus A380. Getting ready to deal with these gargantuan jetliners while almost tripling its fleet is a colossal undertaking.

Within two years Emirates Airlines will receive the first of its 45 Airbus A380 airliners. That the airline is preparing to take delivery of the world's largest passenger jetliner in itself would be a major maintenance production. Add to that the fact that it will almost triple its fleet over the next eight years and maintenance planning becomes a major issue.

The airline currently operates 58 wide-bodied airplanes--both Boeing and Airbus--with two more A340-500s soon to be delivered, and has a total of 103 additional airplanes on order for delivery by 2012. It is currently ridding itself of its last aging A310, giving it a modern fleet of A330-200s, A340-500s, A340-600s, and Boeing 777-200/ 300s. Along with the giant A380s, it also has A -340-300s and Boeing 777-300ERs on order.

Average age of the fleet, not counting the soon-to-disappear A310, is three years. While that relieves some of the maintenance burden, the pressure of having two aircraft brands and numerous aircraft types is compounded by a mandate to maintain the airline's award-winning image.

The basic philosophy of Emirates's maintenance program is to ensure the image of excellence that the airline has built up over the past 18 years remains at a high level, according to Ahmed Safa, manager, maintenance control and operations. The airline is headed by Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, a member of the ruling family of Dubai and head of civil aviation for the emirates. At its inception, Sheikh Ahmed mandated that the airline produce a profit totally on its own and become the leading airline in the Middle East. Emirates has now achieved both of those goals.

As part of this program of excellence, the airline linked its maintenance and operations departments under a single manager, Adel Al Redha, executive vice president, engineering and operations, who is now responsible for introduction of the A380 while running both programs for the airline's rapidly growing fleet.

Preparation for all the new airplanes is being done under two main aspects, Al Redha said, "One from facilities and one from resources." On the facilities side, construction began this year on a new eight-hangar compound designed to house every aircraft type in the Emirates fleet, including the 575-passenger A380-800 scheduled to arrive in late 2006. The $275 million Emirates Engineering Center will include the eight hangars as well as an aircraft washing bay, a paint hangar, an administration block, a waste treatment plan, and a 2,000-car parking lot. It will also include a mosque. The engineering center is expected to be completed and ready for use by the end of next year. At that point, the current maintenance facility will be returned to the Dubai Airport administration to be torn down for construction of a new terminal. The new engineering facility is being built under a management contract with the French company A�roports de Paris International. ADPI will develop the overall design and act as lead consultants on the project.

Construction of the new engineering center began near the end of the second quarter. Phase 1, which includes some of the hangars and the administration block, was expected to be completed by September, according to Ali Mubarak Al Soori, head of facilities management.

A key element of the hangars will be a computer-controlled automated maintenance docking system that will allow access to all areas of every aircraft in the fleet, up to and including the A380, providing safe working platforms up to 60 feet above the hangar floor. The airline already has an automated docking system that can be configured to any twin-engine widebody.

Al Redha noted that whereas it used to take an entire day to set up a maintenance dock to allow access to the aircraft, it can now be done in 90 minutes. He also noted that the automated dock system is the only one like it in the Middle East.

The $4.5-million docking system is laser-guided and capable of wrapping itself around the aircraft to within one centimeter of the fuselage. It operates with electronic controls and 14 electric motors.

When Emirates started in 1985, it did not have any maintenance facilities, "not even hangars," Al Redha said. "It just had shelters. Then we started increasing the maintenance capabilities so that we could do C-checks by the early 1990s. Since then, we have increased the capabilities to do up to C4-checks, which is the same as what was formerly a D-check."

As for resources, Al Redha said that they are building up gradually, including building to the capability of doing parallel C-checks, "which means we will be increasing our manpower in heavy maintenance. That will be gradually increased as there is an increase in the fleet." In an interview with Aviation Maintenance at the Dubai Air Show last December, Al Redha said the airline currently has about 1,200 engineering and maintenance personnel, "which will gradually increase to 3,000 to 3,500 by 2010 or 2012."

Currently only about 15 percent of the Emirates employees involved in maintenance are UAE nationals, "although when compared to just the engineer, the ratio of UAE nationals is higher," Al Redha said. To increase the number of UAE nationals in the maintenance division, Emirates has started a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship program where students are starting right out of high school. "After three and a half years, they are qualified to get a license," he said. "Then it takes about five years from the time they start the program to be qualified engineers on a specific type of aircraft."

The airline takes about 30 students a year for the apprenticeship program, with some of the graduates already working for the airline. "Some of these start out as a mechanic, then move up to be an engineer," Al Redha said. "We take resources from all over the world, but will reduce the number of expatriate engineers as the number of in-house UAE engineers become qualified."

One of the biggest problems facing the airline in its drive to increase the percentage of UAE nationals for mechanics and engineers is that not many people in the UAE are aviation-oriented. "It is not like in other countries where people are aware of aviation and maintenance, so trying to market or raise the awareness in the UAE of maintenance activities is difficult. But gradually more and more people are becoming aware and showing more interest in aircraft maintenance," he said.

Al Redha himself is a native Emirati who graduated from Northrop University in Los Angeles, California and joined Emirates as an engineer in 1988. He earned a masters in Air Transport Management in 1997 and was appointed to his current position last June.

As another move to increase its engineering resources, Emirates has signed an agreement with Lufthansa Technik to explore the possibility of mutual cooperation. Tim Clark, president of Emirates, and August W. Henningsen, chairman of the executive board for Lufthansa Technik, signed a memorandum of understanding at the Dubai Air Show to evaluate the feasibility of a joint venture on spares pooling support for aircraft types flown by both airlines. Initial evaluation will be done based on the A340-500 and -600, possibly to be extended to other aircraft types.

Emirates also signed a letter of intent with General Electric Engine Services during the air show for long-term maintenance support of the CFM56-5C engines used to power the airline's A340-300s Emirates will be receiving later this year. The agreement has a potential value of more than $200 million for GE.

While a major disadvantage to Emirates is the lack of aviation awareness in the UAE, a major benefit is that Dubai is extremely information-technology oriented. It has created a huge IT building complex called "Internet City" where virtually all the world's major computer companies have offices and research facilities. As a result, Emirates is heavily involved in IT, including its maintenance/engineering division.

Emirates uses Mercator's data processing system for its IT link between its procurement section and its suppliers, Safa said. All serial numbered parts are integrated into the IT link, so "our inventory is totally controlled."

Al Redha noted that the majority of its spares inventory is maintained in Dubai, "although we keep in various stations a limited availability of the parts that we believe will be the most needed and that could prevent an aircraft from being dispatched." Emirates also pools with other airlines flying similar aircraft types "and we have a permanent understanding that we can rely on them as they would do when they fly into Dubai."

Emirates also has agreements with other airlines for maintenance at outlying stations, although Al Redha said that if there is an outstation where they are not comfortable with the other airline's staff for maintenance work, then they will base their own engineers there or fly engineers out if something happens to an Emirates aircraft.

The IT link is not only for the control of spares. Every aircraft in flight has an IT link with the maintenance base, with engineers monitoring the system 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, Al Redha said. The on-board computers automatically send messages to the Maintenance Control Center (MCC), he added, "so that the managers know exactly how the aircraft is behaving and they know exactly any defects that the aircraft might have and if there is any issue with the aircraft. [The maintenance managers] depend on the IT to tell them exactly what the problem is, what the defects are, and what part numbers are involved" so they can be ready for any required maintenance work as soon as the aircraft is on the ground.

"The engineers know exactly what is wrong with that aircraft, what kind of spare is needed and what type of qualification the engineers need to have, such as mechanical or avionics. So once the aircraft lands, it takes [the engineers] the absolute minimum of time to deal with the problem," he said.

Maintenance and operations are coordinated under the Integrated Operations Center (IOC). With an onboard computer able to feed any maintenance problem directly to the MCC, the IOC can determine whether or not the aircraft needs to divert to a nearby airport or can continue to its intended destination.

"Everything a pilot sees in the cockpit is seen in the IOC," Safa said. "The computers then do the troubleshooting and provide possible solutions" The information is fed through a datalink, with text messaging to the pilots.

A key advantage to the monitoring system is that it can prevent aircraft having to make expensive diversions when there is no real need, Al Redha said. "Both the pilots and the engineers have the same information on their screens, so they can communicate about how serious the problem really is," he said. "This has prevented a number of unnecessary diversions because they were able to determine the severity of the problem." He added that not only does the prevention of unnecessary diversions save the airline significant amounts of money, it prevents a negative impact on the part of the passengers.

"In one instance we had a pilot report a problem in a new aircraft, wanting to know if he should divert the flight. The situation was sent on to the manufacturer, who transmitted a report back that there was nothing wrong and not to worry about it," Redha said.

Al Redha also noted that the onboard computers record such things as hard landings. "It is not the duty of the pilot to record hard landings. A hard landing can be very subjective [on the part of the pilots], so the computer tells the engineer when the landing was too hard. With a heavy landing, there are certain maintenance activities that must be done. If it doesn't get reported, there is no action, so you are flying the aircraft with a problem and nobody knows it. Today, the minute we have a heavy landing the message is automatically sent to maintenance so that the engineers know exactly what happened and what is needed to launch the required action so that the aircraft is safe."

Al Redha said that Emirates is one of the first airlines to launch this type of cockpit/maintenance interface program. The cockpit computer program uses Airbus software for all the Airbus aircraft, while Emirates worked with Boeing to develop the software for those aircraft in-house, he said. The data is assimilated in the aircraft, then transmitted either through satellite or VHF to a ground network and on to a server, then routed to the nearest facility able to deal with the problem.

The computer software is being further enhanced "so that, for instance, if a passenger wants a car or something specific, the message comes to the ground and goes to a central station or server, and is then sent on to the department concerned, which will deal with the information," Al Redha said. "A confirmation is then sent back saying, `We've got the car waiting for you at Heathrow Airport when you arrive.'"

Emirates is planning to digitize everything in the cockpit, putting all manuals into an onboard computer, he said. "There are a massive number of manuals in the aircraft--flight manuals, maintenance manuals. It's very intense since we go all over the world. We're linking flight operations with engineering, preparing for digitizing to allow for better communications. But there are a number of organizational problems, a number of areas that we need to look at. The question is how to do it.

"We started two years ago with maintenance manuals, putting them on a laptop. In fact, we are using our laptop to calculate the aircraft's performance, which is more accurate and gives the pilots more efficient means of operating the aircraft. That is on a laptop, but we are trying to move it onto a hard site on the aircraft." The first aircraft to get the hard site computers will be the 777-300ERs, he said.

The philosophy is to maximize the use of electronic data on board the aircraft versus hard copy, he said.

Emirates also provides third-party maintenance for airlines from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Al Redha said. It handles 22 carriers at its Dubai facility and about an equal number at its outstations, providing about $5.5 million in additional revenue for the airline. "We have already done up to C-checks [for other carriers] and are increasing our heavy maintenance activities" in that area, he said.