The Technical Operations Division has the responsibility to maintain the airline’s fleet at the highest standards with respect to safety and performance. Safety is the number one priority of all IATA member airlines and is never compromised. However, balancing operational performance and maintenance cost is a difficult challenge for any airline in the world.
The Maintenance Cost Task Force (MCTF) has undertaken the job of generating a benchmark report to assist the airlines in further understanding cost drivers and to identify potential opportunities to further reduce maintenance costs without compromising safety and operational excellence.
Membership to the MCTF is open to all airlines. Participants in the IATA’s Strategic Partnership Program can also attend the functions of the group but they may not have limited access to confidential airline information.
The annual report generation is based on the following process:
- Defining common standards and terminology in the industry
- Creating a unique toolset to capture maintenance cost data and information
- Distributing the toolset to all the airlines
- Submitting the completed toolset to IATA for further analysis
- Validating, consolidating and analyzing the reported data
- Presenting and discussing the data at the Annual Maintenance Cost Conference
- Identifying key cost drivers and developing a strategy to contain and minimize them (along with industry partners)
- Creating a Maintenance Cost Report that provides the status of the industry in the area of Aircraft Maintenance Costs
- Individual airlines contributing data will get a comprehensive report