Our core workforce is experienced, motivated and highly qualified. The average tenure in the shop is greater than 12 years. Our new hire process is involved and looks for experience within the industry while at the same time seeking those who like to tinker and have built things other than aircraft engines. This approach has enabled us to integrate best practices from other industries that may never have been considered, and in the end produces a better team with even better results. This outside the box approach has resulted in a superb and diverse group of professionals that possess the skill set to manage and maintain the legacy APU fleets common in today’s older aircraft to include most models of the GTCP85 Series, GTCP660 Series and TSCP700 Series APU’s – some of which are nearly 50 years old but still running strong.
In addition, we have the capability to develop complete capabilities on new platforms to include and our most recent APS3200 addition. With this vast spectrum of experience, our ability to take a new product from whole to completely disassembled to the detail level then source the repair parts and rebuild to whole again and successfully certify is without precedent in this field – and we are able to do this at the APU or Accessory level.
A shining example that portrays our complete package occurred in 2003. We were awarded a contract that required us to develop complete APU repair capabilities for an out-of-state government entity due to a Congressional mandate. The receiving entity had never seen this model APU prior to our involvement.
We developed a five-year milestone timeline
that broke down the project as follows:
Facility Modifications
- Increased pneumatic capability in existing structure at new site
- Hired contractor to route power and air supply utilities
- Mapped required floor space for future operations
- Performed major modification to existing test cell to allow new platform to be tested
- Directed power drop placement requirement throughout repair facility
- Developed Test Stands, Test Adapters, Overhaul Tooling and provided Commercial Off-the-Shelf items
- Over 480 pieces of Support Equipment designed, fabricated and delivered
Technical Data
- Authored a complete Technical Manual set consisting of 33 manuals
- All manuals approved by user and published for use
- These manuals are still maintained by TurbineAero Repair 14 years later to ensure currency
Maintenance Demonstration and Training
Deployed team of subject matter experts consisting of Lead Technicians and Engineers to new site and provided hands-on training for the following eight modules:
Components
Components
First Article Validation / Validation
Our Lead Technicians provided on-the-job training, our Engineers red-lined Technical manuals while introducing new tasks. The team returned to home station, completed necessary Tooling and Technical Manual changes, and redeployed to new site. At this point, the trainees performed the maintenance with our Lead Technicians and Engineering witnessing to complete the module.
Drawings and Documentation
- Following design, drawings were completed on over 480 pieces of Support Equipment, submitted to the new user for approval. Once approved, these drawings were submitted to the government and are still in use today as reference material for the tooling provided.
- TurbineAero remains the primary day-to-day parts supplier for repairs to this day.
- On-Site Engineering support was provided to this Customer on a continual basis for eight years; at that point Engineering support was moved to our current facility but our Engineering team continues to provide day-to-day support to this day.
- We continue to provide a quarterly training class consisting of field technicians, Field Service Engineers, and depot-level technicians where this model APU theory and operation is taught.
The contract was deemed complete by all parties in 2009. Today the APU repair workload is split between both repair centers who work together to overcome hurdles. Supply Chain and Engineering support are considered routine in the course of our day-to-day activities. Our involvement has enabled this new entity to complete over 1000 repairs on APU’s and Accessory components since then. A superior partnership has been formed that has become the benchmark for depot level partnering with commercial repair sources that remains the Gold Standard the government refers to as how to successfully manage a new program from inception to activation, and the government fulfilled its objective to meet the Congressional mandate in the process.
The above story represents our long-term commitment to the Customer, our desire to maintain the healthiest fleet of APU’s possible while sharing our expertise and maintaining a teamwork-oriented atmosphere to solve current issues that hamper us today but also forecast and take the initiative to prevent small problems today from becoming big problems tomorrow.
In short – there is nothing we cannot do.
