Auxiliary Power Units or just APU’s are important technical components of the aircraft. AviTrader's Keith Mwanalushi investigates the various considerations for maintenance and repair.
Just prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic, industry data showed that the projected global aircraft APU market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 5.3% to reach almost 1.5bn U.S. dollars by 2023.
Due to the significant amount of the global aircraft fleet either in storage or in very low utilisation, Nick Filce, Director - Asset Sales and MRO at AerFin says this means that there is very little demand for APU maintenance support at present as most APUs are on-condition components, rather than driven by the calendar – which is the case for components such as landing gears, for example.
AerFin has a significant level of APU and APU LRU inventory across the Airbus, Boeing and Embraer product lines. “This breadth of stock, coupled with our level of customer integration, means that we are able to offer a wide-range of completely bespoke, supply-chain solutions that meet the operational and budgetary requirements of our global customer-base. These range of solutions include APU trading, leasing, pooling as well as a range of purchase lease options,” Flice explains.
AerFin have APU inventory located across multiple regions, with inventory positioned with MRO partners in North America, Europe as well as Asia. AerFin’s now well established BeyondPool™ programme offers specifically tailored nose to tail component support and the APU forms part of this package with the accessories and LRU’s being covered under a comprehensive exchange and repair programme. Flice continues: “The solution provides airlines with a range of options in terms of component supply and maintenance coverage, which are tailored to the requirements of the operator. We have typically found that operators prefer to have APU LRUs covered in the programme, with a number of solutions to support the full APU dependent on the operator’s budgetary and operational requirements.”