In 1948, United Airlines established a maintenance base at San Francisco International Airport. Seventy years later, the place is still hard at work keeping the airline’s planes safe and in the air. Every year, United brings tens of thousands of its employees to the base for Family Day, and this year the airline invited us to take part.
What a wild, awesome day it was! We got to meet “Chix Fix,” United’s award-winning all-female team of aircraft technicians, go on a tour of the maintenance facility, and celebrate the day with the United family. We even got to sample some food from Boeing’s newest plane: the 777-200BBQ (tail number N1BBQ)! AvGeeks eat your heart out, and read on for plenty of photos from the day’s fun.
Resting in the hangar, a Boeing 747-400 undergoes a C-check
We recently paid a visit to China Airlines’ (CI) primary maintenance facility, located at Taoyuan International Airport outside Taipei. The monster facility–which held three Boeing 747-400s and an Airbus A340-300 at the time–is able to perform all standard maintenance regimens from A to D checks, as well as landing gear replacement and painting.
In for a two-week C-check, a Boeing 747 shows signs of care in progress. Each cabin is inspected in detail.
Unfortunately for us (probably good for the airline) their new Boeing 777-300ER wasn’t in the hangar at the time. Being so new, CI is currently only able to complete A-checks on the airplane. It expects to be able to offer up to C-checks by mid-2015, and add service to Panasonic’s IFE system in 2016. Check out our photo gallery and learn more.
Condor Boeing 767-300ER being worked on in their maintenance facility
With Condor Airlines being a smaller, low-cost carrier, it is not a huge surprise that their on-site maintenance facility at Frankfurt Airport (FRA) is quite small (well, in comparison to others like Lufthansa Technik).
Just because the hangar might not have the volume of other locations, it is a place where the job gets done. Ensuring that aircraft are checked and safe is no easy task, but a very important one.
Condor’s facility at FRA is able to work on one Boeing 767 at a time — and they only work on their 767s and 757s there. Condor sublets out the work done on their Airbus aircraft at other facilities around Europe.
A TAM Airbus A330 and A320 get worked on at the MRO
The location of TAM Airlines’ Maintenance Operation Center (called “MRO” for Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) is in a unique location. It is not found at a major airport or even within a large city. It is located about three hours (by car) northwest of Sao Paulo (GRU) in the middle of farm land.
The facility used to be a tractor factory, with a runway built next to it to fly in the company’s parts. Turns out building your own airport and flying in parts, rather than shipping them via road, was not the best business decision and the tractor company went out of business.
TAM’s maintenance facility is located about 15 miles from Sao Carlos
TAM saw this as a great opportunity to purchase the land and open their MRO. Large facilities already existed and, more importantly, a runway. So just over a decade ago, TAM opened up their MRO about 15 minutes north of Sao Carlos, a town of around 220,000. I was recently invited to check out the facility, and it was a semi-adventure just getting there.
On overview of hangar four shows a handful of aircraft in the shop. Most notably however, is the LOT 737-400 in the foreground. The airplane, now out of service, was painted gold to celebrate the free and fair elections in the country after the fall of communism.
By Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren and originally published November 20, 2013 on Airchive.com
As part of our trip to Poland in October we had an opportunity to visit LOT Aircraft Maintenance Services on a Saturday afternoon. Technically separate from LOT, the company can handle anything from a simple tire repair to a heavy D-check, aircraft painting to 737 avionics.