Repair design engineering in Saline, Michigan (USA)

Hello Bjoern, please explain your function.

I am in charge of the new repair development at our Liebherr-Aerospace service center in Saline, Michigan (USA), creating all the necessary design data to do all the repairs covering our product portfolio such as air management systems, flight controls, hydraulics and landing gears.

Why is the new repair design engineering department located specifically in Saline?

A lot of repairs are being done in Saline. This site covers and is responsible for our Customer Service activities for North and South America. During the last years we experienced a continuous growth of existing fleet sizes and new aircraft types, which means also a lot more of our products are in need of support. Consequently, this created a higher demand in repair development and it made sense to do more of this work in Saline. It is also beneficial to develop some of the repairs according to the same rules and regulations as the repair shop itself and as a whole is governed under.

How is your function integrated in the design repair engineering activities within the worldwide Liebherr-Aerospace Customer Service Network?

Our whole network can benefit from these activities by having the repairs done where it makes the most sense concerning regulations. For example, the site here in Michigan works under FAA regulations, while our sites in Lindenberg (Germany) and Toulouse (France) are governed by EASA regulations.

Thus, our facilities in Saline, Toulouse, Lindenberg, Singapore and Shanghai can efficiently share all repair design processes and create a database which will help to determine where it makes more sense to do repairs in the future.

Each site will of course keep its functions; we will just share information and benefit from each other’s knowledge and expertise.

There is also a further advantage: when applying new repair technologies in Saline, we work with highly specialized vendors of which there are worldwide only a few on the market. Our whole network will therefore benefit from such new technologies and the knowhow.

What are the benefits that you foresee for your service center in Saline and the other Liebherr-Aerospace service centers?

For our service center in Saline the main benefit is more independence as we will be faster in repair development and more efficient. Being able to perform more repairs of different products under one roof reduces the turnaround time of the repairs and increases the aircraft availability of our customers.

For the Liebherr-Aerospace service network, every service center benefits from working under Aviation Authorities regulations applicable to its geographic location and can share information with the other service facilities.

In a nutshell: With our new design repair engineering department we will become faster and even more efficient – for the benefit of our customers.