Airborne Engines Ltd. is a Rolls-Royce certified Authorized Maintenance Center (AMC) in British Columbia, supporting all series of M250 engines, modules, accessories and components. As well as being a Transport Canada certified AMO, it is a Honeywell Authorized Service Center for maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), and testing of all T53-series engines, components and accessories.
Airborne started small, leasing a compact warehouse unit in Richmond, British Columbia. In the early 1990s, the founders saw an opportunity to supply gas turbine repair and overhaul services in British Columbia’s lower mainland, especially on the popular Rolls-Royce M250 series.
As their reputation for quality and service grew, they spotted a similar opportunity for the Honeywell T53 series. So in 1995, Airborne Engines expanded its focus, leasing an adjoining unit and doubling its floor space. The following year, the Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A series engines were added to its capabilities. In 2009 the shop moved into a spacious new 32,000-square-foot facility in the nearby Fraser Valley community of Delta.
The gradual, controlled expansion worked well with customers. “One of our strengths is that we are a small, privately-owned company,” said Colin Bartole, vice-president and general manager. “That offers some diversity — we are able to be more nimble and agile than some larger organizations. We have a breadth of both management and employees who are high-timers in the industry, so we all certainly understand the ins and outs of the aviation industry, in Canada and around the world.”
As well as domestic and civilian, those customers include military, such as the U.S. Department of State and a number of foreign militaries. “We support commercial, parapublic, and foreign military T53 and Rolls-Royce 250 operators around the globe,” said Bartole.
And when it comes to the T53, “we have the most advanced rework capabilities in-house in the entire T53 network,” he said. “Unquestionably, we build the best T53 in the world. Our engines have a long history of going the entirety of the mean time between inspections without failure.” So Airborne is able to provide its customers with extended mean time between removal and mean time between failure rates that just are not found anywhere else in the industry, he further explained. “The fact that a customer can install one of our engines and it does not come out again until its next scheduled inspection is something that not many companies can promote.”
Adding to that edge are the company’s engine and gearbox exchange programs, offering outright and exchange sales of both product lines: T53 and 250 engines and modules. Additionally, Airborne maintains its own onsite engine test cell, which allows delivery of a finely tuned engine — customers don’t have to use their aircraft as a test cell. “We know when that engine leaves here we have the confidence that everything we have done to it will be proven for the field and the customer will receive the maximum benefit,” said Bartole.
As successful as the company was, Airborne Engines continued to look ahead. Three years ago, Bartole was hired to “reposition the company for growth and expansion into the future.” Airborne’s parent company M-International “saw some opportunities, so they brought me in to redesign and restructure the organization,” he explained. That was achieved through a number of different areas.
“We had to instill some cultural change,” he said. “The old way of doing things was not to be what carried us into the future. And you can’t do that without having the right players on the bench from a leadership perspective, so we ended up changing the entire leadership team from the CFO down to the production managers.” They were wholesale changes, and now Bartole reckons the company has really skilled, talented, aviation-oriented folks who understand the business and its customers.
“That competitive advantage we now have going into the future is being such a close knit group,” he said. Bartole now re-identifies and brands the company as “the new Airborne.” Rolls-Royce liked the change, naming Airborne the Most Improved Facility in 2015. The award is presented to a facility that exhibited the most significant improvement during calendar year 2014, which resulted in improved process efficiencies and increased customer satisfaction.
(604) 244-1668
If you would like to see your company featured in Insight, contact sales director Frank Sargeant at frank@mhmpub.com.
