By Staff Correspondent
Emirates, the Dubai-based airline and world’s largest operator of Airbus A380 long-range aircraft, has recently signed two major contracts with Lufthansa Technik AG for comprehensive Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul (MRO) services. As per the agreements, Lufthansa Technik will provide Emirates with highly flexible extra capacity for A380 base maintenance such as C-checks and overhaul main landing gears of the airline’s double-deck flagships.
This also marks the first time that Emirates has outsourced heavy checks from its in-house A380 MRO facilities to an external provider. The long-term landing gear services contract will be fulfilled by Lufthansa Technik Landing Gear Services in the United Kingdom. Over the next 13 years, the specialised workshop will overhaul main landing gear shipsets for some of Emirates’ A380s and restore them to “as-good-as-new” condition before delivering them back to the customer’s MRO facilities for re-installation. The first of these landing gear overhauls is scheduled to begin in August.
In addition to this, Lufthansa Technik Philippines (LTP) in Manila, the Lufthansa Technik Group’s competence center for heavy checks on the world’s largest passenger aircraft, will provide additional capacity for A380 base maintenance services. The first Emirates A380 has already arrived at LTP at the end of January, and the center has invested in additional A380 overhaul capacities to cope with the significantly increased demand for MRO services on the largest commercial airliner type. These are planned to go online in the second half of 2023 and will initially host additional checks for Emirates.
According to Kai-Stefan Roepke, Vice President Corporate Sales Europe, Middle East, and Africa at Lufthansa Technik, “With most airlines now having left the Covid crisis behind and air travel demand skyrocketing, passenger capacity is needed more than ever, and this positively affects MRO demand for the A380. The happier we are to not only bring our existing and well-proven capabilities for this aircraft type to market but also to invest in building up additional capabilities such as the third A380 overhaul line in Manila.”
While the A380 base maintenance services are an entirely new field of cooperation for Emirates and Lufthansa Technik, the MRO provider and the airline already enjoy a long-standing business relationship in other technical segments. Emirates’ decision to outsource heavy checks for the first time to Lufthansa Technik is a testament to the latter’s proven capabilities and competence in the A380 MRO segment.
