Adria Airways opened a new hangar today at Brnik, where it will perform maintenance work on aircraft for Adria and other airlines…
Adria Airways opened a new hangar today at Brnik, where it will perform maintenance work on aircraft for Adria and other airlines . This new, modern hangar measures 2,250 m² and has room for three Canadair Regional Jet aircraft or one Airbus A320. Both hangars – the previously existing one and the new one – have a total area of 4,000 m². The value of the investment in the hangar is €2.5 million and the main contractors for the project were SCT, Trimo Trebnje and Subs d.o.o.
The new hangar at Adria Airways, the airline of Slovenia, will make possible greater flexibility and continued expansion of our aircraft maintenance service for foreign carriers, which we began in September 2002, when the Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier authorized Adria as its only European heavy maintenance centre for CRJ aircraft. Since then Adria has carried out work on over 200 CRJ aircraft for foreign airlines, primarily Lufthansa, Brit Air and Austrian Airlines Group.
Adria is expanding its maintenance centre operations this year to include the Airbus A320 family, and work on three aircraft was carried out in February and March. At the beginning of June, Adria signed a strategic partnership agreement with Air France/KLM Industries, one of the biggest maintenance centres in the world, for which it will perform maintenance work on A320, A321 and A319 aircraft for airlines from Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
“This year we will perform maintenance work on approximately seventy aircraft from foreign carriers; we have maintained our established customers and acquired quite a few new ones,” says the director for aircraft maintenance at Adria, Pavel Prhavc.
“We have already been performing maintenance work at Adria for forty years, and we have therefore accumulated a great deal of high-tech knowledge that we are continually maintaining and building upon. Now we are also selling the knowledge of our highly trained staff. The expansion of our activity also means economic growth for the region and new jobs, because aircraft maintenance is a labour-intensive business with high value added per employee,” emphasized the president of Adria Airways, Branko Lueovnik.
Aircraft maintenance is a growing business around the world because airlines are increasingly focusing on their basic activity of carrying passengers, and aircraft maintenance is being performed at specialized centres. The most recent estimates indicate that this service represents approximately $36 billion in global turnover (2004 data), of which the European share is 28 percent. Annual growth in this line of business is expected to be 5.6 percent.
In 2004 the share of revenue from maintaining aircraft for third parties represented just under 10 percent of Adria`s total revenue and amounted to €11.5 million. Adria is planning to increase its turnover in aircraft maintenance for foreign carriers, and expects to achieve revenues of €18 million in five years.
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