PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Manchester-3
Thread: Manchester-3
View Single Post
Old 26th Jul 2021, 23:46
  #563 (permalink)  
Downwind_Left
 
Join Date: Nov 2000
Location: South East
Posts: 154
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Airlines don’t routinely use hangars for line maintenance of any description, including window changes. Engine changes and the like all happen outside. Hangars, including ones you own, are usually booked up months in advance for heavy checks so there is usually little capacity for causality maintenance. Notable example being the likes of BA at LHR that have a casualty hangar.

If an airline is having to put an aircraft in the hangar, it’s going to be quicker to tow over an alternative aircraft or even fly in a standby from elsewhere. I’m sorry but your scenario is totally unrealistic. I spent many years working in an operational role for a Manchester based airline. It was our head office. Second biggest base after Gatwick, 30+ Airbus and Boeing aircraft. We didn’t have a hangar. Anywhere. Did all our own line maintenance. Most overnight checks were done in the Monarch hangar on a planned basis. Occasionally some were done at Luton. Major checks were sometimes done at the same, but contracted out in places like GAMCO Abu Dhabi for the most part. And this was a Manchester based airline.

Nobody is going to build a hangar to keep the engineers dry doing a wheel change or replacing a windscreen, sadly.

The lack of hangars isn’t a commercial disadvantage to the airport, or any airline operating there. Given that the ones MAN already has are in their current status is proof of if they were needed, that they are not a deal breaker if not available.

Major changes have been made at increasing intervals between scheduled hangar maintenance, even for existing types. Aircraft hangars are now much less essential than they were previously in decades gone by. Case in point. Ryanair. 458 aircraft. Biggest airline in Europe. About 5 hangars… STN, DUB, WRO, PIK, BGY… or BA’s huge CWL wide body hangar. They’re not doing AOG work there, because they don’t fly there.

Im sure MAG would in no way mind if someone planned and built a new hangar at Manchester, but partly as a result of how busy the airport is in normal times, it’s not an ideal place for aircraft maintenance unless a particular airline has a huge base there. And I mean huge. Which is why the likes of BA have Cardiff, AA have Tulsa and Lufthansa have Malta among others. It’s easier to have it at a quiet airport you can easily get slots at. Casualty maintenance is a red herring with technical reliability rates above 99.8%.
Downwind_Left is offline