In This Article:
British Airways is to open a new maintenance hangar at Gatwick airport as it scrambles to reduce delays to its European summer holiday flights.
The £88m hangar, bought from Boeing, will allow BA to carry out repairs at the airport rather than sending planes to facilities scattered around the UK, as it has done in the past.
The move to speed up repairs comes after BA was rated the second-worst performer in Europe for cancelled flights last year, with more than 7,000 services lost, according to a survey by Cirium.
Disruption has been caused by an aircraft availability crisis, triggered by the grounding of Boeing 787s for unscheduled repairs to their Rolls-Royce engines.
While the Gatwick hangar will not service the 787s, it will provide much-needed additional capacity. The large 787s can monopolise maintenance capacity at BA’s existing facilities, impacting repairs to other jets.
Sean Doyle, the airline’s chief executive, said the new hangar should “improve summer utilisation” of the 26 Airbus short-haul jets that serve Mediterranean destinations for BA from Gatwick.
Mr Doyle said the new site will provide “an immediate cost saving” by diminishing the need to fly Gatwick-based planes to other locations for maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO).
He said: “The ability to do more on-site maintenance is very attractive. What we’ve found in the last few years is having more resilience on our MRO and maintenance functions is a real strategic advantage.
“It also gives us the capacity to do more winter maintenance across our short-haul programmes.”
The deal with Boeing will result in BA taking over the site and its workforce of more than 100 technicians, creating a subsidiary to be called British Airways Engineering Gatwick.
Boeing opened the Gatwick hangar at a cost of £88m in 2019, planning to provide maintenance to a fleet of 787 jets with which Norwegian Air aimed to challenge BA by offering cheap North Atlantic flights.
However, Covid-19 rendered the site a white elephant as airlines ceased flying. Boeing repurposed it for converting older 737 passenger jets into cargo planes to meet burgeoning demand following the pandemic. With the normalisation of trade flows, demand for freighter conversions has now faded.
While BA already has a maintenance operation at Gatwick, it lacks the space and expertise to undertake so-called heavy maintenance work. BA currently has heavy engineering facilities at Cardiff and Glasgow airports, together with a more limited operation at Heathrow.
The Gatwick purchase is expected to be completed in the next few months, in time to start supporting the BA Airbus A320-family fleet by the summer.