NEWS FLASH
TAP Air Portugal will send four of its Airbus A320 aircraft for maintenance to Adria Tehnika starting next week until the end of July. Although the development marks good news for the maintenance, repair and overhaul provider, it has ruffled feathers in Lisbon. The Portuguese national carrier has its own maintenance division and its union noted that sending aircraft to Ljubljana is further proof of a lack of staff among its ranks. "TAP performs maintenance tasks on its aircraft in other certified maintenance organisations other than TAP Maintenance & Engineering. It has always done and will continue to do so", the carrier said, responding to criticism. Adria Tehnika, part of the Aviaprime group, is recognised as an Airbus MRO provider and a Bombardier Authorised Service Facility for the CRJ family in Europe. Last year, it iinked a five-year maintenance contract with easyJet.
Its a shame what was LJU turned into in last 2-3 years. Into maintenance, storage and cargo airport.
ReplyDeleteGood maintenance costs money, just like with cars. No reason to look at this development as bad. Cargo, too. Airlines and airports earn good money from cargo lines, often more than with flights. No reason to see everything in SLO so negatively when, if you travel around, you see it’s far from bad. Regular air traffic could improve, I agree, but to develop other sectors isn’t bad. Far from it.
DeleteI agree with 15:14 guy;
DeleteIf there is cargo demand, you could see some connections being established just because of the cargo demand (for example, Doha could be one of them) - where pax numbers don't really matter that much.
In addition to that, I think Lju would be recovering way better, if there were both aircraft and workers available, Lju has reached 50% of 2019 traffic last month - which, when you count both adria, covid and now lack of workers/aircraft isn't THAT bad.
Yes as someone living in Slo, it would be much more convinient to have better connectivity, but it's not that bad at all - at least for business travel, for turism - yeah we are f*ed
There is already one A320 TAP in LJU. I am also surprised, TAP has very big maintenance facilities for all type of aircafts.
DeleteIn the Portuguese government's rescue deal for TAP, one of the European Commission's requirements for approval was that TAP Maintenance & Engineering's Brazilian subsidiary was sold (but there are no buyers) or shut down (which is what's going to happen).
ReplyDeleteOn the one hand, the low labour costs in Brazil and the fact that many of TAP's aircraft fly there all the time anyway made it look to me as if it was genious to do maintenance there, but apparently, the business is and has been loss-making.
This should mean that the employees in Portugal have nothing to complain about. They should still have plenty of work to do, while the lack of in-house capacity because of the Brazil business closing down can be covered by external MROs like Adria. In time, maybe they staff up their own operation in Portugal, but for now, this solution probably makes sense.
Were they maintaining their A319/320/321s or their A330s in Brazil?
DeleteI'm not sure, but they had capability for all those types in Brazil. Could be that they only maintained A320 family aircraft for external clients, though. Either way, if only the A330s were done in Brazil but now will be maintained in Portugal instead, the resources allocated to that work frees up the A320 work for Adria.
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