Airplane engines are in short supply. The business of fixing older ones is booming

Parts and labor shortages. Delayed deliveries of new airplanes from Boeing and Airbus. An engine recall. Premature repairs. It’s all piling up, and aircraft engine shops around the world are overflowing. As travelers boarded planes in record numbers this summer, airline executives waited anxiously for repairs and overhauls of their engines. The repair and overhaul of engines has swelled from a $31b business before the pandemic to $58b this year, according to Alton Aviation Consultancy. It’s a cash cow for engine makers like GE Aerospace and the hundreds of smaller specialists that service GE engines, and others made by Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce. American Airlines’ solution is to do more of the work itself. “We just have one customer and that’s American Airlines doing our work,” American’s chief operating officer, David Seymour, said. “We can control our own destiny in that area.” At its bustling engine shop at the airline’s 3.3m-square-foot maintenance facility at Tulsa International Airport, the largest such space in the world, American is on track to increase its overhauls roughly 60% from 2023 to more than 16 engines a month this year. That’s up from five a month in 2022. It’s added some 200 jobs there, as well more equipment like cranes to hang the 2-ton engines during overhauls. The work focuses on CFM56 engines, made by a joint venture of GE and France’s Safran. They power American’s older Boeing 737 workhorse jetliners and many Airbus A320s. Those narrow-body airplanes make up the majority of American’s mainline fleet of more than 960 aircraft, according to an annual company securities filing. “I can get these engines overhauled and through the shop in less than 60 days versus [outside] shops nowadays [are] 120 to 150 days, in some cases north of 200 days,” COO Seymour said.<br/>