A new generation of major MRO facilities is taking shape around the world as the aerospace industry prepares for sustained aftermarket demand. For AddQual Managing Director Ben Anderson, the scale of investment also highlights an equally important opportunity: increasing the productive capacity of the engineering processes operating inside them. China Eastern Airlines has commissioned what it describes as Asia’s largest widebody aircraft maintenance hangar in Shanghai, creating a 46,000 sq m facility capable of accommodating nine widebody and two narrowbody aircraft simultaneously. Plans to expand the operation to ten widebody maintenance lines, two narrowbody lines and a dedicated painting line underline the scale of the ambition. China Eastern Aircraft Maintenance Engineering is targeting annual productivity of two million work hours within five years as it grows both airline and third-party MRO activity.
For the international aerospace aftermarket, developments on this scale provide a visible measure of the investment being directed towards maintenance capacity. Yet AddQual believes another form of capacity is becoming increasingly valuable: digital capacity.
“New hangars, equipment and maintenance lines create physical capacity, while digitalisation gives MRO businesses an opportunity to increase the productivity of the processes within that footprint,” said AddQual Managing Director Ben Anderson. “The next stage of MRO productivity is about connecting those two things. If inspection data can move immediately into engineering decisions, repair routing and process planning, every investment in physical capacity has the potential to work harder.”
Turning inspection time into productive capacity
That principle sits at the heart of AddQual’s work with Turbine Repair Technologies (TRT), the joint venture between Rolls-Royce plc and Chromalloy UK specialising in the inspection, repair and overhaul of gas turbine components. Through a NATEP-supported programme, Derby-based AddQual worked with TRT to develop a repair digital twin combining automated metrology, process information and software to support engineering decision-making. The project centred partly on Trent 700 high-pressure turbine components and explored how detailed dimensional information could be captured, connected and used throughout the repair journey. A conventional inspection, assessment and associated repair-documentation process for these components can occupy around an eight-hour shift.
AddQual and TRT therefore explored how richer digital inspection data could help engineers understand component condition, categorise parts and select appropriate repair routes more efficiently. The significance extends beyond accelerating an individual inspection, because every hour released from repetitive data capture, interpretation and administration represents potential capacity that can be redirected towards engineering activity. Applied across hundreds or thousands of components, that creates a compelling productivity opportunity.
“The interesting metric for MRO businesses increasingly becomes how much engineering value can be generated from the people, equipment and facilities already available,” Anderson said. “An eight-hour inspection process contains measurement, information handling, assessment and decision-making. Digital technology allows us to examine that entire sequence and determine where automation can create more capacity for skilled people to concentrate on the engineering decisions where their knowledge delivers the greatest value.”
From bigger facilities to smarter workflows
The rapid development of global MRO infrastructure makes that distinction increasingly relevant.A hangar capable of processing more aircraft creates demand throughout the maintenance ecosystem. Engines and components move into specialist inspection, repair, metrology and engineering processes, generating substantial volumes of information as they progress. AddQual’s TRT demonstrator provides an example of how that information can become part of the productive infrastructure itself. The company mapped TRT’s processes, stakeholders and data requirements before developing a digital environment capable of capturing information from the beginning of the repair process through subsequent stages.
AddQual also developed a robotic pick-and-place system capable of moving multiple components through metrology scanning, supported by a human-machine interface and functionality designed for extended autonomous operation. The result brings together three areas that have traditionally been viewed separately: metrology, automation and engineering data. Anderson believes integrating those disciplines can help MRO organisations translate investment in equipment and facilities into higher throughput.
“Metrology tells you about the component, automation gives you repeatability and capacity, and the digital thread makes that information available to the wider repair process,” he said. “When those elements operate together, inspection becomes an active source of intelligence. The data generated from one stage can inform what happens next, while accumulated information across many components can provide a much richer understanding of the repair process itself.”
Every component becomes a source of intelligence
This creates a further benefit as MRO volumes increase. Each component passing through a digitally connected repair environment can contribute to a growing dataset covering incoming condition, dimensional characteristics, inspection results, repair routing and process outcomes. Over time, that information can support increasingly sophisticated analysis of repair processes and component populations.Instead of digitalisation simply reproducing an existing workflow electronically, the opportunity is to create a system that becomes more valuable as more components pass through it.
“Scale creates data, and data creates the opportunity for better decisions,” Anderson said. “If an organisation is processing growing numbers of components, there is enormous value in capturing what those components can tell you. You begin building knowledge around condition, repair routes, process capability and outcomes that can support future engineering decisions.”
This is also where AddQual sees growing potential for technologies including MiDAS and MiDAS MIND, connecting inspection information with automated workflows and increasingly intelligent decision support.
A productivity opportunity for UK aerospace MRO
The scale of facilities now being developed internationally also provides an important reference point for the UK aerospace sector.Britain already possesses substantial expertise in engine manufacture, component repair, metrology and aerospace engineering. AddQual believes digital qualification and repair technologies can help turn that expertise into an increasingly scalable competitive advantage. The TRT project required around eight person-years of development effort, progressing from process mapping into software, collaborative robotics and a functioning industrial demonstrator.Its wider significance now lies in exploitation. AddQual is continuing to explore opportunities with TRT while developing the technology towards broader deployment across aerospace MRO, including software-based services capable of connecting inspection, repair and qualification information.
“Global MRO demand is creating a major investment cycle,” Anderson concluded. “We are seeing impressive physical capacity being created around the world, and alongside that sits an opportunity for the UK to lead in the digital technologies that make maintenance and repair increasingly productive.“
"The TRT programme demonstrates that this is practical technology. We have taken digital twins, automated metrology and connected repair data into a real aerospace environment and shown how they can support the people making engineering decisions.“
For AddQual, the opportunity is to take those lessons into the wider market. The MRO facilities of the future will combine physical capacity with digital capacity, where every inspection generates useful intelligence and every component contributes to improving the decisions that follow. As aerospace aftermarket investment accelerates, that combination could become an increasingly important measure of MRO competitiveness. The industry is building more places to maintain aircraft and engines; technologies developed through programmes such as AddQual’s collaboration with TRT show how those facilities can also become smarter with every component they process.
