Lufthansa Pursues MRO Carve-Out

Lufthansa is targeting €200 million ($234.8 million) of annual savings from the digitalization of technical operations and carving out certain engineering and maintenance functions from Lufthansa Technik.

The backbone of this project is AMOS, the MRO software used by all Lufthansa Group airlines, while Lufthansa said it had already “insourced” more than 300 positions from Lufthansa Technik Line Maintenance.

Through a combination of AMOS and electronic technical logbooks that are now fully rolled out across the fleet, technical processes are now completely paperless, allowing Lufthansa to use AI and digitalization to further reduce costs.

“An example of this is the ramp check,” Lufthansa Airlines CFO Joerg Beissel said during a recent capital markets day presentation. Every time an aircraft hits the ground and goes to its position, a technician has to come from the hangar to check the tires and oil.

We believe we can use a camera and AI to check the tires, and we can use a digital signal from the aircraft to check the oil, so it’s no longer necessary for that technician to leave the hangar.”

Beissel added that this has saved a “double-digit” percentage of technicians from having to leave their hangar work to perform R checks.

Further efficiencies are being sought through offshoring certain engineering functions—a process that has already begun—while all airlines in the group are now using a single CAMO.

“This will reduce complexity and create synergies as all the airlines use AMOS, so it’s easy to manage all the aircraft,” he said.