SriLankan Engineering has launched yet another project to save the country and the airline an expense which is set to be approximately Rs.50 million. This latest endeavor will see SriLankan Engineering staff changing the landing gear of the airline’s widebody Airbus A330 fleet on home soil as opposed to carrying out the project at an overseas facility. This is the first time that this sophisticated operation has been carried out in-house at SriLankan Engineering on a widebody aircraft. Work has already been completed on two of SriLankan’s four A330 aircraft in September, with a third repair scheduled for December and the last one being scheduled for March next year.Priyantha Rose, Manager Aircraft Maintenance, said that latest project “further strengthens the position of SriLankan Engineering as a Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) organization of choice in the region, and we intend to market our new capability in landing gear changes to other airlines, especially as we now have the necessary tools as well as the experience”. The programme which needs to be performed upon the completion of ten years’ service of an aircraft is a mandatory requirement specified by the manufacturer, Airbus Industrie. Over a decade, the impact of thousands of landings by the 180-tonne aircraft on runways around the world at a touchdown speed of 150 miles per hour, wears down the structure of the complex, moveable parts of the landing gear.
Rehan Fernando, Manager Procurement and Logistics (Aircraft), said that “the programme has enhanced the level of exposure of our aircraft engineers and technicians, which will be a significant advantage when we begin landing gear changes on SriLankan’s four-engined A340 fleet starting next April”.
The project required the acquisition of specialized tools to handle the specific gear in question. An A330 has two sets of main landing gear which each weigh three tonnes, and one nose landing gear which weights one tonne.
SriLankan’s A330s serve on long-haul routes such as Paris, Frankfurt, Rome, Beijing and Hong Kong, and medium range sectors such as Dubai, Kuwait, New Delhi, Bangkok and Singapore. In the meantime SriLankan Engineering is also receiving growing recognition from airlines in the region for its maintenance, repair and overhaul capabilities. It is about to complete a series of C-checks on no less than thirteen A320 aircraft of India’s largest private airline IndiGo, a 8-month programme launched last February. In July it carried out two major projects on two Airbus aircraft of the Pakistani airline Airblue – a C-check on an A321, and a landing gear change on an A320.
SriLankan Engineering possesses the prestigious industry standard EASA 145 from the European Aviation Safety Agency, in recognition of its commitment to the highest standards of professionalism in aircraft maintenance. It has also won global awards from Airbus Industrie twice over for operational excellence among small airlines that operate A330 and A340 aircraft.Over the past year SriLankan Engineering has carried out certifications on aircraft of more than a dozen airlines that operate to Colombo’s Bandaranaike International Airport including Air Arabia, Kuwait Airways, Kingfisher, Qatar Airways, Royal Jordanian, Condor, First Choice, Etihad, Gulf Air, Jazeera, Bahrain Air, China Eastern, Livingston, and Emirates.
The Technical Training School of SriLankan Engineering also possesses EASA 147 certification from the European Aviation Safety Agency, and provides training for budding aircraft technicians from India, the Maldives and the Middle East, as well as from Sri Lanka.