Lufthansa Technik to increase workforce to 700
"As long as aircraft keep flying, they will need maintenance".
Lufthansa Technik Malta is to increase its workforce to over 700 from its current 450 over the next 24 months as its new €60 million wide body aircraft facility nears completion in time for inauguration in April, chief executive officer Louis Giordimaina confirmed this week.
The company's current recruitment drive will see an additional 50 people join the Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul facility - now Lufthansa Technik's largest facility within its maintenance network in Europe - in the next few months alone. That includes newly graduated engineers, financial professionals and Mcast graduates and apprentices working to obtain aircraft maintenance licences and related qualifications.
Lufthansa Technik Malta currently has 150 Mcast trainees undergoing theoretical training; 127 people have already completed training at Mcast, 73 of which are now employed with Lufthansa Technik Malta and 54 are undergoing on-the-job-training with foreign supervisors on its shop floor. They will be employed on successful completion of their course. Mr Giordimaina says that the young blood within Lufthansa Technik Malta means that the average age atthe company is in the early 20s.
Despite having to walk around the five-level building aided with crutches after breaking his ankle in two places eight weeks ago, Mr Giordimaina is visibly satisfied this mammoth project (in which the government has an eight per cent stake) sitting on a 61,000-square metre footprint on the perimeter of Malta International Airport is on track.
The first of two new wide body aircraft hangars is currently occupied by a Lufthansa Airbus A330 undergoing a "D" check - a complete overhaul that should take over 30,000 productive man hours. The hangar and its stores, workshops, administration and ancillary building took exactly 18 months and 22 days to be completed before the first aircraft layover which commenced on December 22. Meanwhile, work is progressing well on the second wide body hangar which, with the first, occupies 17,000 square metres - the size of four and a half football fields - and should be ready by May.
Once completed, both bays will be able to house A330s and A340s. The narrow body hangar for A320s and Boeing 737s is being given its finishing touches and by the end of this month, aircraft and personnel will begin to migrate from the original facility which Lufthansa Technik Malta has been operating from. All hangars should be fully operational by the end of September.
The business plan stipulates that by 2010 at full capacity, Lufthansa Technik Malta will be able to handle work on two wide body and three narrow body aircraft simultaneously, and personnel should average 650,000 productive man hours a year on aircraft maintenance.
The specifications are staggering: the administrative space on the top floor, where two-thirds of the network of desks are manned as the rest lies in waiting for new recruits, occupies 3,000 square metres. One narrow body hangar bay is 6,100 square metres; the workshops total an area of 8,000 square metres on two floors while the stores sit on 4,000 square metres on two levels.
"C" checks on narrow body aircraft require between 1,000 to 3,000 productive man hours of work spanning between three to 10 days.
Lufthansa Technik Malta will now be able to dedicate 170,000 to 190,000 productive man hours of work on the narrow body aircraft a year, or the equivalent of 60 to 70 aircraft a year.
The Malta facility will also be able to clock up between 450,000 to 500,000 productive man hours on complete overhauls on wide body aircraft.
Lufthansa Technik Malta has come a long way since the joint venture with Air Malta kicked off operations in 2003 in a hangar belonging to the national carrier for maintenance operations on A320s and 737s. By the end of 2008, over 350 "C" checks had been carried out on narrow body aircraft, half of which on Lufthansa aircraft.
In 2003, Lufthansa and Air Malta made up 70 to 80 per cent of the initial maintenance contracts at Lufthansa Technik - then operating with just over 100 staff. Other work was mostly carried out for Spanair, still a long-term customer. Just six years later, 75 per cent of business now comes from third party customers.
The most illustrious of Lufthansa Technik Malta's newest customers is Qatar Airways, but its growing portfolio includes BMI, German Wings, Air One, Nigerian Airline, Arik, Fly Niki, the carrier belonging to former Formula 1 ace Niki Lauda, and business aviation group PrivatAir.
The CEO says Lufthansa Technik Malta's main competitive advantage is a package of a young, qualified workforce, flexibility, language, quality, and turnaround time while being cost-effective.
"This is all value added to customers," Mr Giordimaina, who was Air Malta's first Maltese chief engineer for 10 years, points out. "Add competitive pricing and we are now able to compete with the best in the industry, including Air France/KLM and Swiss Technik throughout Europe. Our location also means we could win anchor customers from the Middle East. Our objective is to remain cost competitive and conscious of turnaround time."
The Malta facility is backed by a group that has global presence, with 29 subsidiaries and affiliates employing 26,000 people, and an annual turnover of €5 billion. Boasting over 1,600 contracted aircraft, the group is currently in the throes of a standardisation drive.
Mr Giordimaina is particularly proud of his growing team: "Our COO and our CFO are expatriates seconded from Lufthansa Technik but all other key management positions are occupied by Maltese professionals.
"MCAST has been instrumental in training young men and women specifically for this industry which just two years ago started from scratch, experience-wise. We have some supervisors and some trainers on secondment from Lufthansa Technik Philippines overseeing the new recruits. Even before they obtain their certification, students already have a logbook detailing all their on-the-job training and signed by an approved supervisor. It will serve them throughout their career in aviation."
The opportunities are endless: Maltese trainers are able to update their own skills under recurrent training programmes, a group of spray painters who were recruited through the ETC recently returned from a six-month training stint in Hamburg, and a first group of 120 Maltese aviation mechanics travelled to the Lufthansa Technik Philippines for training.
Mr Giordimaina is understandably proud of the spin-offs the project has generated for the local economy, especially in terms of construction, catering, transport, waste collection, and office materials supply contracts.
"When Lufthansa Technik was looking to expand its wide-body MRO operations outside Germany, it looked at the Middle East, South Africa and ex-Eastern European countries," Mr Giordimaina recalls. "The Malta operation beat the competition thanks to its track record, costing and flexibility. It was also thanks to the negotiation with the government which provided the necessary support for the financing of the infrastructure.
"One of the pre-conditions before the green light was given by Lufthansa Technik on the Malta project, however, was the negotiation of a long-term collective agreement with the unions. Most collective agreements in Malta have three-year terms - the collective agreement for Lufthansa Technik Malta is now for six."
The agreement also had to provide for flexibility. A first for Malta was the agreement over "banking hours" - a programme under which staff would "bank" a batch of extra hours clocked up and later "cash" them for time off, for instance. Banking of hours for employees helps Lufthansa Technik ease the pressure in lean times.
Will the global downturn affect Lufthansa Technik Malta?
"Like everybody else, we are subject to the whole crisis by the downturn of the global economy. However, it is not so immediate. Initially less passengers are travelling which means a reduced seat factor for the airlines, but as long as aircraft keep flying, they will need maintenance," Mr Giordimaina points out.
"If the trend continues, airlines might decide to park part of their fleet so the demand for aircraft maintenance reduces and slows down the business. This industry is cyclical like any other. Like other businesses, it has to be run wisely and prudently. We have to ensure that the entire team is mindful of the fact that we have to be competitive at all times to win business and maintain that business".
The company's current recruitment drive will see an additional 50 people join the Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul facility - now Lufthansa Technik's largest facility within its maintenance network in Europe - in the next few months alone. That includes newly graduated engineers, financial professionals and Mcast graduates and apprentices working to obtain aircraft maintenance licences and related qualifications.
Lufthansa Technik Malta currently has 150 Mcast trainees undergoing theoretical training; 127 people have already completed training at Mcast, 73 of which are now employed with Lufthansa Technik Malta and 54 are undergoing on-the-job-training with foreign supervisors on its shop floor. They will be employed on successful completion of their course. Mr Giordimaina says that the young blood within Lufthansa Technik Malta means that the average age atthe company is in the early 20s.
Despite having to walk around the five-level building aided with crutches after breaking his ankle in two places eight weeks ago, Mr Giordimaina is visibly satisfied this mammoth project (in which the government has an eight per cent stake) sitting on a 61,000-square metre footprint on the perimeter of Malta International Airport is on track.
The first of two new wide body aircraft hangars is currently occupied by a Lufthansa Airbus A330 undergoing a "D" check - a complete overhaul that should take over 30,000 productive man hours. The hangar and its stores, workshops, administration and ancillary building took exactly 18 months and 22 days to be completed before the first aircraft layover which commenced on December 22. Meanwhile, work is progressing well on the second wide body hangar which, with the first, occupies 17,000 square metres - the size of four and a half football fields - and should be ready by May.
Once completed, both bays will be able to house A330s and A340s. The narrow body hangar for A320s and Boeing 737s is being given its finishing touches and by the end of this month, aircraft and personnel will begin to migrate from the original facility which Lufthansa Technik Malta has been operating from. All hangars should be fully operational by the end of September.
The business plan stipulates that by 2010 at full capacity, Lufthansa Technik Malta will be able to handle work on two wide body and three narrow body aircraft simultaneously, and personnel should average 650,000 productive man hours a year on aircraft maintenance.
The specifications are staggering: the administrative space on the top floor, where two-thirds of the network of desks are manned as the rest lies in waiting for new recruits, occupies 3,000 square metres. One narrow body hangar bay is 6,100 square metres; the workshops total an area of 8,000 square metres on two floors while the stores sit on 4,000 square metres on two levels.
"C" checks on narrow body aircraft require between 1,000 to 3,000 productive man hours of work spanning between three to 10 days.
Lufthansa Technik Malta will now be able to dedicate 170,000 to 190,000 productive man hours of work on the narrow body aircraft a year, or the equivalent of 60 to 70 aircraft a year.
The Malta facility will also be able to clock up between 450,000 to 500,000 productive man hours on complete overhauls on wide body aircraft.
Lufthansa Technik Malta has come a long way since the joint venture with Air Malta kicked off operations in 2003 in a hangar belonging to the national carrier for maintenance operations on A320s and 737s. By the end of 2008, over 350 "C" checks had been carried out on narrow body aircraft, half of which on Lufthansa aircraft.
In 2003, Lufthansa and Air Malta made up 70 to 80 per cent of the initial maintenance contracts at Lufthansa Technik - then operating with just over 100 staff. Other work was mostly carried out for Spanair, still a long-term customer. Just six years later, 75 per cent of business now comes from third party customers.
The most illustrious of Lufthansa Technik Malta's newest customers is Qatar Airways, but its growing portfolio includes BMI, German Wings, Air One, Nigerian Airline, Arik, Fly Niki, the carrier belonging to former Formula 1 ace Niki Lauda, and business aviation group PrivatAir.
The CEO says Lufthansa Technik Malta's main competitive advantage is a package of a young, qualified workforce, flexibility, language, quality, and turnaround time while being cost-effective.
"This is all value added to customers," Mr Giordimaina, who was Air Malta's first Maltese chief engineer for 10 years, points out. "Add competitive pricing and we are now able to compete with the best in the industry, including Air France/KLM and Swiss Technik throughout Europe. Our location also means we could win anchor customers from the Middle East. Our objective is to remain cost competitive and conscious of turnaround time."
The Malta facility is backed by a group that has global presence, with 29 subsidiaries and affiliates employing 26,000 people, and an annual turnover of €5 billion. Boasting over 1,600 contracted aircraft, the group is currently in the throes of a standardisation drive.
Mr Giordimaina is particularly proud of his growing team: "Our COO and our CFO are expatriates seconded from Lufthansa Technik but all other key management positions are occupied by Maltese professionals.
"MCAST has been instrumental in training young men and women specifically for this industry which just two years ago started from scratch, experience-wise. We have some supervisors and some trainers on secondment from Lufthansa Technik Philippines overseeing the new recruits. Even before they obtain their certification, students already have a logbook detailing all their on-the-job training and signed by an approved supervisor. It will serve them throughout their career in aviation."
The opportunities are endless: Maltese trainers are able to update their own skills under recurrent training programmes, a group of spray painters who were recruited through the ETC recently returned from a six-month training stint in Hamburg, and a first group of 120 Maltese aviation mechanics travelled to the Lufthansa Technik Philippines for training.
Mr Giordimaina is understandably proud of the spin-offs the project has generated for the local economy, especially in terms of construction, catering, transport, waste collection, and office materials supply contracts.
"When Lufthansa Technik was looking to expand its wide-body MRO operations outside Germany, it looked at the Middle East, South Africa and ex-Eastern European countries," Mr Giordimaina recalls. "The Malta operation beat the competition thanks to its track record, costing and flexibility. It was also thanks to the negotiation with the government which provided the necessary support for the financing of the infrastructure.
"One of the pre-conditions before the green light was given by Lufthansa Technik on the Malta project, however, was the negotiation of a long-term collective agreement with the unions. Most collective agreements in Malta have three-year terms - the collective agreement for Lufthansa Technik Malta is now for six."
The agreement also had to provide for flexibility. A first for Malta was the agreement over "banking hours" - a programme under which staff would "bank" a batch of extra hours clocked up and later "cash" them for time off, for instance. Banking of hours for employees helps Lufthansa Technik ease the pressure in lean times.
Will the global downturn affect Lufthansa Technik Malta?
"Like everybody else, we are subject to the whole crisis by the downturn of the global economy. However, it is not so immediate. Initially less passengers are travelling which means a reduced seat factor for the airlines, but as long as aircraft keep flying, they will need maintenance," Mr Giordimaina points out.
"If the trend continues, airlines might decide to park part of their fleet so the demand for aircraft maintenance reduces and slows down the business. This industry is cyclical like any other. Like other businesses, it has to be run wisely and prudently. We have to ensure that the entire team is mindful of the fact that we have to be competitive at all times to win business and maintain that business".