The Ryanair Method Of Maintenance

Transcript

Karsten Mühlenfeld:Buenos días, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's really nice to be here. It's even better that we have today a bit of sunshine outside. Yesterday evening was really so— not really so nice. So I'm here to talk a bit about Ryanair's engineering and maintenance, how we do that, how a low-cost airline can actually also operate a low-cost maintenance without impeding safety and making sure that we have really the highest standard on safety. But safety is actually a standard given situation which we have in the company, right? We— you expect always today that aircraft are safe, right? There's no debate about that at all anymore. Even so, there were the Boeing issues. Now you expect as a customer or even as an airline specialist that there's never a safety issue. So the real question is how you can do that sufficiently low cost. And that's the idea which we do. And you can see here, comparative-wise, we are on ownership and maintenance very low. And despite we are anyway very low in costs, internal costs, right? But you see an ownership and maintenance very, very low. And a lot of this one is actually maintenance, that we do our maintenance quite efficient without too much External support. We do a lot of our maintenance internally, and that even so we have 86 bases, 239 airports which we support, over 2,100 routes. We increased our routes even in in 2020. Even so, we are missing quite a lot of aircraft, as you all know, because we didn't get the max. We increased our passengers, and we are hopefully on track for the 200 million and for. financial year '24, but that really depends on Boeing getting the MAX. We don't name it anymore MAX, right? We name it now Boeing -8-200 because the name, the title MAX, nobody likes anymore. So that's what we— what really is not what we want to do anymore. What we really look currently is therefore how do we do our maintenance? And we really do our maintenance ourselves primarily as much as we can. And that's the reason why we have in the airline about 2,000 engineers, about 800 line maintenance engineers, about 1,100 heavy maintenance, plus 200 logistics and materials and continued airworthiness engineers. So in order to do that, we have 70 line stations, all there where we primarily fly. So most of the big bases where we have more than 2 or 3 aircraft, we have our own maintenance established now. And the biggest are obviously London Stansted because we have there the biggest amount of aircraft, about 48 aircraft are there positioned, and therefore we have there a 5-bay hangar where we just do line maintenance, just do the support which is necessary on the day-by-day issues to fix shortfalls, to fix hills, to fix mal issues which exist. Second one, obviously, there where we live, where we are all coming from, from Dublin, with the 2-bay. Then we have in Bergamo, Italy, a 3-bay facility, and Spain in Madrid. Unfortunately, in Spain, Madrid only one, and the main reason for that one is cost. To build a hangar in Madrid is just too expensive. That's— let's face it, yeah, it's very expensive. However, on heavy maintenance, we have— where you don't need to be at your heart of your operation because the aircrafts will go there for a longer time, you can have actually your hangars in places which are cost-efficient, not only from the airport point of view that you can build and erect the hangar very cost-efficient, it's also from labour cost, it's a much better situation. So for a long time we have Prestwick in Scotland with now 6 lines, in the past it was only 5 lines, but we have now 6 lines established, a really big hangar. We are flying only into Glasgow with two, or we have in Glasgow only two aircraft based. But it's good enough in all for us to get the aircraft in because we're doing in Prestwick really our extreme long checks, the checks which are 11 years or 14 years checks for an aircraft. That means these are checks which are usually going for two weeks. Then we have Kaunas, Lithuania with two lines, Wrocław in Poland with two lines. There were Founded some five years ago, and we recognize that the cost base actually in these countries are increasing significantly faster than we like. Yeah, and enough engineers available in these regions anymore. That's the reason why we finally invested in the here. Right? Probably that's the reason why I'm invited because we are invested here with two lines now, four lines in 2021, and hopefully also in 2021 one. line maintenance hangar. So we are expecting to have in 2021 5 bays, a 5-bay hangar over here in order to make sure that we can support our fleet. And I must admit, Sevilla is brilliant because you find engineers much easier than in most of the other areas where we operate. The cost which you have here is very effective and efficient, so it's relatively easy to deal with, to set it up, to coordinate the work. The people are enthusiastic working here, so it's— from my point of view, it's really great to have a hangar in Sevilla. Despite that, in summer it's a bit hot for me, right? But if you come from Dublin, what do you expect? So, so what are really our challenges now in, in the current years, right? The first issue is obviously we have to operate with a minimum of spare aircraft, not because we like that, but in summer you want to use all your aircraft as much as you can. That's one element. And the other element is obviously that Ryanair has difficulties to get their additional aircraft. We expected to have significant amount of MAX aircraft already by now. We expect even for the, for the next year There was an expectation that we have in the next season already something like 50 aircraft, and we get now maximum 10, maybe 20 if we are lucky. It depends when when it really gets certified. So we really have to make sure that we operate with the minimum which exists, and the only way to achieve this is to minimize the hill ratio and to maximize the dispatch reliability. I can tell you we operate in the summer season. Usually with our 460 aircraft which we have, with less than 6 spare aircraft on average over the week. So the only way to do that and not creating then high delays is really to make sure that all aircraft are fit for purpose, that you don't have long-standing issues on the aircraft which you haven't fixed immediately, and that you have always in the morning the whole fleet ready to fly. So that's our first challenge. The second one is because we don't have spare aircraft in summer, we have to do the maintenance all in winter. So what we really do, we do maintenance primarily between— only between November and March. And we have in the shoulder period, in September, October, about 6 aircraft available where we can maintenance. Wow. And we have on the other shoulder period, which is April-May, also 6 aircraft where we do maintenance. But with a fleet of 460 aircraft, it means you have to operate then something like 20 heavy maintenance lines in parallel between November and April. And that's not easy to operate like that, because it's a real difficult issue to go from zero work in summer to 20 lines in winter because you have to have labor contracts which allow that. So we have annual contracts with our people that they don't work in summer, that they only work in winter, that they do overtime in winter. And obviously you also have to think about it that not every year you have the same amount of work, so we have to think how to handle that one. Obviously an issue is on that one because we don't get the new aircraft as we wanted. We have some older aircraft. Usually we wanted to get rid of our aircraft with about 17 years. Now we have some aircraft which are older than 17 years, and we have to do the 17-year check. And you have to do on the Boeing aircraft the so-called FL92 check, which means you have to inspect for corrosion and have to rip out the whole interior and inspect the wings in detail, which cost us additional time this winter and is a real challenge. We also want to do as much ourselves, and the main reason why we want to do the majority of heavy maintenance work ourselves is because we are usually faster than external facilities. We do it with less time. I will show you how. And then you have the problem that we can't grow our internal facilities fast enough anymore because we always take the assumption you can't produce more than one additional line per winter, otherwise you can't train the people quick enough and then you don't get the same standard of operation and heavy maintenance as you have in the already existing lines. And the third issue is obviously for maintenance is that we have to keep our industry-leading environmental efficiency standard, which is in these days very important, especially in Europe. And if you have a parliament in Europe which really says we have a climate issue in Europe now, so you have to be sure that you are absolutely clean or as much as clean as it's possible. And no fake, obviously. Now, so how do we do that now all on line maintenance? Start with the first issue there, with the first challenge, line maintenance. So we have reduced our HIL ratio in the last 12 months by a factor of 3. So we are down now to a HIL ratio of 0.3. That's industrial leading in Europe. Can't judge how the Americans work that one, but the real way to do that is that we do 95% of our line maintenance ourselves, that we ensure that we have the— that we have really the right amount of people available at all places, that we have spare parts not only in one position, that we have that also distributed in our network so that you can fix aircraft overnight. And one of the issues obviously which we also introduced into our fleet is we have 3 Learjets where we transport spare parts across Europe. If we recognize in the evening there's an error or a failure on an aircraft somewhere in Europe, we can put the spare parts in our main distribution center in Stansted onto a Learjet and bring the spare parts and, if necessary, specialists over to wherever it's needed and fix the aircraft overnight. So that's really one of the secrets, and as we recognized that Stansted got more and more congested, and if you go then flying to Jordania or to Tel Aviv, probably also a bit too far away with one Learjet, not that the Learjet can't fly so far. But what you really want is to get fast there, so we established now a second distribution center in Bergamo, and we have also one Learjet in Bergamo, which makes sure that we have overall best connectivity between all the airports which we have. Right, and the second consequence of that one, that we do that the whole time, is that we are industry-leading on dispatch reliability, as you can see on the chart there. Where's my colleague from KLM? That we are— that they are the second one, right? They are the second one. So that's a competition with us here, right? That they are also very good on their dispatch reliability. So that's the second important element. That's obviously only a chart for Boeing aircraft, but we only have Boeing aircraft, so we can't compare with others. So how do we do that overall in the company despite that we have the Learjets? One of the issues, one of the big secrets for us is that you have everywhere full live visual management of all the data. So you can see our HIL ratio on screens in every airport, in every facility now. You can see how it's over the different AUCs which we have. You can see what are the— which is on the bottom— what our main issues where we need to do to work on. So usually the lavatory is one of the bad issues. You see it with a red arrow. You see how many aircraft are AOG, and the only the red number is important. The other one, the, the total scheduled AOG, total scheduled AOG are heavy maintenance. So it's base maintenance which we currently do. So we had, as I took the snapshot, we had 32 aircraft in base maintenance, in, in repair and overhaul. We had 5 Which shouldn't be, right, which should fly. So, and this chart is live, you can get that everywhere, it will be every 10 minutes updated and you see where we are. And you see also as you're on the left side, if you click on the red 5, which we can't do here, but if you do that on your computer, you will come automatically on the chart, which aircraft is it, where is it currently placed, what needs to be done, and who's responsible for it. So visual management is one of the secrets in order to run that as fast as possible. And we do even overnight, uh, HIL production dashboards. So every 8— uh, every of our 60, uh, plus facilities have a— get overnight a clear chart which HILs, which issues they have to repair per aircraft at that night. And then you can see they don't achieve always what they should achieve, but at least we plan that properly. And we are really striving in the direction to get that improved. So, we also measure then the hills opening and closing per base in order to make sure that we always see who is good and who is not good. And I can tell you, everybody who opens more hills than closed gets challenged why they couldn't close their hills which they have opened that night and what caused it. Very often it's spare parts because you can't have every spare part everywhere. And you can't transport all spare parts every night where you need it. So sometimes it's justified why they delay it. And you see then also on the right side that we have detailed planning charts overall, what cost what, what area, what's the breakdown of the different areas, what parts are not existing. So that's really what you need to do in order to make sure that you keep a good overview. And obviously, the other element in order to keep the dispatch reliability is really to look on reliability. So we have monthly reviews in detail internally, what really caused— have caused the problems, what are the hills which are rare open, which parts failed. You know, Ryanair is the only one who operates airstairs. Now you could claim airstairs operation seems to be not really a good idea because the reliability is not— is the worst one of all what we have. But the advantage of having that one is really that it helps you to close— to fly into an airport and you don't need to wait for stairs to be transported from the airport. So that works well and we measure that also in detail. Now if we look then on the base maintenance, what do we really need to do? We need to know how many base maintenance lines we need, how many base maintenance bay days we have, how many detailed checks we have to do, and when we start with which line and where. So you can see that here on the chart, we look there strategically on really long term how to do that. And as we want to do most of the work internal because we know we do a check much faster than somebody else because we are fully tuned, only do 737-800 checks. Everybody else is doing always a variety of different aircraft, so they are not as attuned as our engineers. So we have increased our capability in 2019 in Prestwick. We increase our amount of bays in 2021 here in Sevilla to 4 bays, and we want to do another one aft. We want to do in 2023 also another facility somewhere else. And you can see on the, on the blue chart how our requirements on different line changes. And by that one, you see you can't do that all internally, otherwise you would have some lines which will be some years not used. So what we try to achieve with our internal planning is to make sure that we always reflect the trough of the, the wave which we have on additional requirements, that we keep the trough as internal work and we outsource the work which buffs the trough. trough in order to make sure that we have there a bit of flexibility and we work with different companies together, preferred in Europe because then you don't need to fly the aircraft so far. But outsourcing workload beyond internal capability is one of our requirements which we want to keep to a minimum, and we are working there also with strategic partners, specifically with companies which are also very much focused on Boeing aircraft because that helps really to to have the highest speeds which is possible in operating that one. Right, and then obviously as a last issue, we have to look at the environment. We really have to make sure that we fulfill the environmental requirements, and on that one again Ryanair is leading. But why are we leading? That's really the question. One of the secrets is obviously that our pilots have to fly according to a Flying Cost Index 6, which is a special program which exists for Boeing aircraft where you can measure what's the most efficient way to fly from A to B. What we actually do here, Flying Cost Index 6, then we make also sure that all our seats are always filled. And it's no secret to say that the fuel consumption and efficiency will be measured against each passenger. So if all seats on the aircraft are always filled, that's good. And then we have also high-density seating, which is also helping to reduce the amount of fuel consumption per passenger. We make sure that we measure the engine fuel flow consumption and wash the engines according to the change of the fuel consumption. We have no business class, that also helps because then you have more seats. Yeah. And obviously we have a very young fleet which is only 6 years old on average, and we are investing in additional aircraft once they are available on the market. So we really want to be one of the green airlines. We really want to make sure that we as an airline really deliver the best or the lowest— the lowest or the highest environmental efficiency which you can have. in order to make sure that all— that our environment is not hampered too much and that we can justify why we fly more aircraft in the future. Thank you very much.

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