MTU Maintenance has celebrated its 40th anniversary and 20,000th engine shop visit in Hannover, Germany.

The first engine to go through the facility was a CF6-50 engine from Hapag-Lloyd in 1981. This program ran within the group right up until June 2019, when the last CF6-50 left MTU Maintenance’s Canadian facility in Vancouver.

MTU Maintenance’s portfolio now ranges from helicopter engines and the popular V2500 to the large GE90-115B widebody engine. Network capacity stands at over 1,100 shop visits per year today.

Having started with around 200 employees, the company now has more than 2,400 in Hanover and well over 5,000 worldwide. Future growth will see capacity grow by 50 per cent in the next five years. The 35,000m² Hannover facility, plus logistic centre and two test cells, is adding a new complex of around 22,000m² by 2020. A new logistics centre was opened at MTU Maintenance Berlin-Brandenburg in June 2019, where a resulting reorganisation of the shop will create 30 per cent more capacity.

Ground was recently broken on a 50 per cent expansion at MTU Maintenance Zhuhai, the second in the company’s 15-year history, which will take capacity to 450 shop visits by 2021. The LEAP program was also introduced here in September 2019. Additionally, MTU Maintenance Canada is moving into a new facility that will expand capacity by 60 per cent and is in the process of introducing the mature CF6-80C2 program into its portfolio. Further, Airfoil Services, a joint venture in Malaysia with Lufthansa Technik, is also being expanded by 5,200m².

Alongside this expansion at existing locations, EME Aero is being constructed specifically for the geared turbofan family in Poland and will work up to a capacity of 400 shop visits per year. Additionally, a new green-field repair site, MTU Maintenance Serbia is in planning for 400,000 repair hours to meet the growing demand for engine component repairs worldwide from 2022.