Airlines grapple with training and maintenance restart challenge

IATA’s safety chief identifies maintenance as the biggest operational challenge airlines face on moving to a full restart of services after the pandemic, in part because uncertainty on when this might happen makes it harder to plan for. The association’s senior VP safety and flight operations Gilberto Lopez Meyer highlighted the issue when asked about the challenges airlines will face during the recovery. ”The maintenance challenge is going to be massive. Like never in history,” he says, pointing to the number of aircraft that have been – and remain – out of service. ”At the peak of the crisis [in May] we had more than 18,000 aircraft parked. There were problems to find space even to park these aircraft,” he says. ”So the maintenance part, among many others, is one of the areas we have to very carefully plan, with the complexity that nobody knows when it [return to full service] is going to happen. Because the more time it takes, the more complex are the maintenance activities we need to perform to the aircraft to be able to get them ready to return to service.” Ensuring aircraft are ready to return to service is not the only operational issue airlines face with so much capacity still grounded because of the pandemic. One of the other major challenges is ensuring the currency of crew, so they are able to fly when capacity is increased. ”You can imagine with the reduction of international flights at this moment, thousands and thousands of pilots have lost recency, because they have not flown enough,” he says.<br/>