A I R L I N E
6 May 2014 AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY
Time is Money
AOG innovations cut the reaction time
By Jerome Greer Chandler
If the AOG requires more than parts, C&L;
can dispatch a mechanic with tools and
parts within a couple hours. Matt King
from C&L; Aerospace.
C&L; AEROSPACE
I
f ever there were a four-letter
word spelled with just three it's
AOG. Accursed though it may
be, regional airline operators,
M ROs, and manu-
facturers have to deal with it.
Reaction time, of course,
depends on just what put the
aircraft on ground in the first
place.
Parts and expertise
"If you're talking just parts,
we can dispatch it via truck," says Chris
K ilgour, CEO of Bangor-based C&L;
Aerospace, a provider of heav y main-
tenance for propjets and new-generation
RJs. "We've used aircraft before … We
use one of these freight forwarders that
gets stuff there quickly."
If the AOG necessitates particular
expertise, "We can dispatch a mechanic
with parts, with the tools, within a cou-
ple of hours. Now we have to have a bit of
time to prepare, to understand the task."
Bangor is about a three and one-half-
hour drive from Boston Logan, and from
Logan you can get to most of the rest of
the planet fairly fast — even out-of-the-
way places. Case-in-point was when a
Saab 340 "got stuck in Oman," K ilgour
says. "They called us up. We
went through some trouble-
shooting with them and they
couldn't work it out. We had
a mechanic with a couple of
parts and some tools on a
f light w ithin three hours.
He was over in Oman the
next day. Got it f lying within
a couple of hours and continued with
the plane to Thailand."
K ilgour contends more operators
are calling upon third-party MROs to
provide AOG services, rather than dis-
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