I attended the MRO Americas Conference this week in Atlanta, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear tremendous support for PMA.
One focus area is supply chain, and supply chain disruption. Several airlines pointed out that supply chain disruptions were mitigated by PMA manufacturers who were able to provide supply chain alternatives. Kevin Michaels moderated a panel on supply chain featuring several air carriers.
Alex Gorinsky, the Managing Director of Aircraft Supply Chain at Alaska Airlines explained that forecasting supply chain needs is not as simple as simply looking at past consumption. Our constantly changing world demands a complex analysis. For example, he is predicting a significant volume of CFM56 overhauls over the horizon, and this concerns him. Gorinsky identified PMA as one of the solutions that he expects to be important to supply chain resilience.
John Bacon Jr was on the supply chain panel. He is the Vice President of Supply Chain at Mesa Airlines, and he explained that sole source parts are a problem. Bacon explained that he wants to have confidence that his supplier is going to have the inventory on hand. This means that suppliers need to be able to make in investment in supporting the air carriers and demonstrate their reliability. Gorinsky echoed this, explaining that in his view, “just in time is dead.” Like Bacon, he said that he expects supplier partners to keep inventory on hand. He noted that he is a “huge” PMA person. This underscores the importance for PMA manufacturers to hold inventory on the shelves for ready-dispatch to the customers.
The panelists agreed that competition is important to the industry. Gorinsky explained that he has faced sticker shock with OEM pricing so he wants encourage competition in the marketplace and he wants to see new suppliers developing in the marketplace. He specifically invited the supply base to let him know where it is making investments and what its new capabilities might be.
Atlas Airlines’ Senior Director of Supply Chain Operations is Althea Arvin. Arvin said that she’s had a lot of PMA conversations in the last year. The result of these conversations was that she realized how important PMA was to her airline’s success. She said that Atlas is recognizing savings from PMA in two important areas: both in raw dollars but also in lead time.
On the next day, Jonathon Berger moderated a panel on Cargo operations. He joked that Kevin Michaels’ panel had seemed like an infomercial for PMA, and he asked his panel whether they are using PMA. The answer was a uniform “yes.” In fact, Ray Bennett (SVP-Technical Operations and Fleet Management for Amerijet International) said that he has no limits on PMA except where lease conditions impact their use.
Another Cargo Panel participant, Isac Roths (CEO of FCAH Aerospace), said that he is currently seeing unprecedented PMA and DER demand, and that the demand is even coming from air carriers who used to not accept PMAs and DER repairs. He identified these as important FAA-approved tools for keeping costs down for operators.
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