If you own a car or a two-wheeler, you are probably best advised to move it around a bit or at least start the ignition once a week during the lockdown. This is to ensure that your automobile’s battery system and other essentials run smoothly when you want to use it again regularly.
Wondering what must airlines do to ensure that their fleets also remain ready to fly when the time comes?
Passenger airlines have stopped flying in India since the last week of March. Till date there have been no formal announcements made about when commercial operations can resume. The nationwide lockdown, as announced by the central government, is in place till May 3.
TNM spoke to two aviation industry veterans and they said that the current situation is unprecedented and never has there been this long a no-fly period in the country’s history.
Mohan Ranganathan, an industry veteran with over four decades of experience, said flights could be taxied around or the wheels can be rotated by jacking the aircraft up.
He said, “The airlines have to ensure that the engines are run from time to time. They have to do periodic hydraulic system activity; they need to ensure that the electronics are well-maintained as the constant heat and dust can foul them up. They can’t leave the system cold for a month as there is every chance that the flight management softwares will fail in that case.”
Ajit Agtey, a former captain with 22 years of experience with Jet Airways, said that aircraft tyres, just like car tyres, will go flat if not moved in a while.
“One might notice that in a car, if it’s stationary for too long, the flattened surface of the tyre cannot regain its shape and that can give a bumpy ride. That happens with aircrafts as well,” said Ajit, who currently works as a trainer with Indigo.
He explained, “To prevent this, the aircrafts have to be towed every two-three days for half-a-kilometre so that the rubber can still remain flexible and is able to regain its shape.”
Similarly, he said that with the airlines unlikely to fly anytime soon, they have to carry out an exercise called inhibition.
“This is done by putting oil in various places depending on the type of aircraft and the manufacturer. The oil has to be drawn out as part of the inhibition process after the engine is run for a certain period of time. This has to be done within a space of every 4-5 days,” he said.
He added, “Once the engine starts, all the other systems in the aircraft are also powered, including the flight computers. All the flight computers are updated every 28 days, so this also has to take place.”
The other maintenance process, he said, is more like regular upkeep required for a house.
Just like there are problems associated with abandoned houses, there can be issues with the flight’s plumbing system in the toilets and the air-conditioning system.
“So water has to be pumped in every 20 days, flush systems have to be used and so on. As the aircraft runs with artificial air pressure and air conditioning, those systems also need to be run. What happens to a refrigerator which does not run for a month? It stinks— the same can happen with the aircraft,” he added.
Ajit said if these procedures are not followed, the airlines will suffer and pay more for complex servicing or even spare parts might have to be replaced.
In connection with this issue, the country's aviation regulator, Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), had passed an ‘airworthiness advisory circular’ on April 9.
Ranganathan pointed out that all this should be part of the standard operating procedure but with airlines failing to pay salaries due to the present economic crisis, staff crunch might be an issue.
Like the DGCA circular, the US Federal Aviation Administration, at the start of April, had ordered all airlines operating Boeing 787 to switch their flights on and off every 51 days at least, to prevent ‘several potentially catastrophic failure scenarios’.
The US regulator’s directive said that if the process is not followed, then that could lead to misleading data projection to pilots.
Kaushik Bhattacharjee, Director of the Kolkata Airport, one of the busier airports managed by the Airports Authority of India, said, “At this moment, there are 52 aircrafts parked in our airport and close to 300 staff are working in a week from the airlines’ side for maintenance operations.”