Repairs on high: engineering innovation in aircraft maintenance

While much of The Engineer’s coverage of the aerospace sector involves the research, development and manufacture of new aircraft, this is hardly the whole story of engineering in aerospace. The average lifetime of any aircraft can be measured in decades, and the effort – and innovation – that goes into keeping them in the air is considerable. And like so many aspects of the engineering world, it has its own set of acronyms.

The most important of these is MRO – maintenance, repair and overhaul – which refers to the activity and the companies that provide this service. The MRO industry is as varied as any other part of the engineering landscape, consisting of companies both large and small. At the top end of the spectrum, many of the large airlines run MRO operations on behalf of smaller players, something that has grown with the increasing prevalence of low-cost airlines that find it cheaper to contract in services than to provide their own. At the small end of the market are operations that tend to service ‘executive airlines’ that run a few business jets.