Airbus Southern Africa wins South Africa’s Best Aircraft Maintenance Organisation Award

Airbus Southern Africa, based at Grand Central Airport near Johannesburg, supports more than 350 light and medium Airbus helicopters in Southern and Eastern Africa.  It launched its transformation programme three years ago.

“Safety and quality are central to everything we do. Our helicopter Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) transformation programme represents a major investment in training and skills development for technical personnel, a completely revised facilities layout and new IT-based systems and management tools. These enabled us to implement more effective processes and work-flows,“ explained Arnaud Montalvo, managing director of Airbus Southern Africa.

“Spanning across all aspects of our MRO and its functions, is our new web-based Quality, Safety and Risk Management solution. This lets us conduct safety and quality audits as well as efficiently managing any corrective actions.  It also incorporates a regulations reader, giving us the ability to create integrated legal cross-reference lists and automatically-generated compliance lists,“ he added.

The solution’s innovative reporting module covers the entire hazard and occurrence reporting process for flight, ground operations, training, continuing airworthiness, maintenance as well as health and safety.  To facilitate reporting when not at the main base, the system can be accessed by smartphone or tablet. 

Customers also derive added value from Airbus’s WebTEK technical support portal.  This enables Airbus and customers to collect and capitalise on, reported technical events , and follow Airbus’s response to their requests and queries.  WebTEK has significantly reduced the response and resolution time. 

As another important element of the transformation programme, Airbus Southern Africa also launched the unique Airbus FleetKeeper e-logbook and flight folio system.  This delivers cockpit views of a customer’s fleet status and enables real-time data exchange between pilots, line engineers and airworthiness managers.  It combines an easy to use mobile and web application for tablets and is hosted on a secure data cloud. 

Airbus Southern Africa is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Airbus. It employs about 100 people at its Grand Central MRO.  They provide light to heavy inspections, upgrades and repairs of Airbus helicopters in service with civil, law enforcement, emergency services, military and para-public operators throughout Southern and Eastern Africa as well as the Indian Ocean islands.  It also has bases at Cape Town International Airport and at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Kenya