Aerostar Announces Belgian Airline MRO Success at Airline Purchasing & Maintenance Expo
Aerostar S.A., the leading Romanian aerospace company, is attending the Airline Purchasing and Maintenance Expo in London (May 7-9) and is using its participation to promote its business-winning success for commercial aviation MRO from a wide geographic area stretching from Western Europe, to North Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India.
The company has had particular success in winning repeat business from Belgian airlines, most notably TUI Airlines (Belgium), trading as Jetairfly - part of the TUI Group, which has a current fleet that includes 17 Boeing 737 New Generation (NG) airliners.
Aerostar won its first maintenance contract with Jetairfly in May 2011 when a Boeing 737-800 was subject to a heavy maintenance visit at Aerostar’s Bacau facility. Later that year a further three Boeing 737NGs and one Boeing 737 Classic visited Bacau for maintenance.
In 2012, eleven Jetairfly Boeing 737s of various types were maintained by Aerostar, while this year has already seen four Boeing 737NGs being worked on at Aerostar, with a further three aircraft contracted for in the May-June timeframe.
Ovidiu Buhai, Director Aviation MRO for Aerostar, stated: “We have enjoyed a close working relationship with Jetairfly for a number of years and this repeat business means that we are hopeful of a medium-to-long-term maintenance partnership with the airline.”
The latest Aerostar development with the Belgian air transport industry is with freight carrier TNT Airways S.A. for its BAe 146 QT freighter aircraft
Following a proposal made by Aerostar to TNT Airways in Liege, the freight company has carried out a detailed assessment of Aerostar across a wide range of disciplines including its facilities, production capacity, experience on the BAe 146, supervision, workshop capability, engineering support, logistics, communications, customer support and production planning.
The result of this investigation is that TNT Airways has arranged for a BAe 146-300QT to come to Aerostar for maintenance in the second week of May.
Aerostar is also approved for the Airbus A320 family and having completed its investments in tooling to support A320 family maintenance and also trained a pool of fully qualified personnel to work on the aircraft, the company has won maintenance work from Freebird Airlines of Turkey in anticipation of planned growth for work on the type.
The past eleven years has seen Aerostar transform its business profile such that in 2011 some two thirds of the company’s turnover was derived from commercial aviation activities – manufacture of aviation products (aerostructures, landing gears and hydraulic systems – around 44 percent), MRO activities on commercial aircraft (around 16 percent) and just over six percent from other products and services.
