Magnetic Group is celebrating 20 years since the first C-check was performed at the company’s MRO centre in Tallinn, Estonia.

The first C-check was performed on a Boeing 737-500 in March 2002 at Tallinn International Airport for Estonian Air. At the time, Magnetic was the in-house maintenance department of the now-defunct flag carrier, and served Boeing 737 Classic and Fokker 50 aircraft, operated by Estonian Air and its Danish shareholder Maersk Air.

Since then, Magnetic Group’s base maintenance business has grown into an independent and innovative business with 20,195sq m of modern MRO and painting facilities in Tallinn, and almost 60 customers from across Europe, including SAS, Austrian Airlines, and Volotea. The company’s base maintenance operations have evolved from microfilm-based operations to a high-tech, independent business line.

“First of all, I’m extremely proud of the team that evolved together with the market (and sometimes even ahead of it),” said Magnetic Group’s head of base maintenance Sergei Shkolnik. “It always was and still is vital for us to constantly develop both our professional skills and mindset – to not hold on to the past but reach for the future. Today, we have a team of 200+ solid, experienced professionals who not just complete set tasks, but solve problems.

“We started performing base maintenance tasks with aircraft manuals in hard copies and microfilms. Yes, imagine that – microfilms. There hardly were more than four or five computers and maybe, two printers for the whole unit. But today, we are using cloud solutions, smartphones, tablets, and other hardware and software – to some extent, today’s aircraft engineers and technicians are also IT specialists. Thanks to new technologies, including those in the non-destructive testing area, we can perform things that we couldn’t even dream of 20 years ago.”

At the end of 2021, Magnetic Group performed its 700th C-check. In the next five years, the company plans to further expand its operations by four new bays and create at least 100 new jobs.