Honeywell Aerospace’s customer support organization has kept busy over the past few weeks reaching out to its customers to talk with them about the different ways they can make the best use of time while their aircraft are largely grounded due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Honeywell v-p of customer and product support Peter Kropik told AIN this week. In addition to a Global Customer Committee teleconference with more than 100 Honeywell customers participating a few weeks ago, the company has held as many as 30 smaller sessions with individual customers to offer tips for optimizing aircraft downtime.
“The overall message has been taking advantage of the time while they’re on the ground,” he said, including bringing aircraft in for regular maintenance and upgrades. It’s also a good time for pilots to go through their required training and any advanced training they’ve wanted to do but until now haven’t had the time. “We’ve been helping guide them to some of the trainings we offer” on its products, such as flight management systems, he added. “They take advantage of a very small percentage of those capabilities. How do we [improve] their knowledge? So we’ve been pointing them to some of those training materials and training activities that are out on our portal.”
Now is also the time to remind operators of cycling engines and APUs, which should generally be run for 15 to 30 minutes once every 30 days, depending on the OEM and the environment of where the aircraft is parked, he said. More importantly, documentation of that activity is key “so that you can show a pristine set of activity that you did during this period to maintain the value and the quality of your avionics, engines, and overall aircraft,” Kropik explained.