Powering Through Covid-19 Together

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rolls-Royce continues to ensure world-class support for our global customer base. We recognize that many of our customers are facing unprecedented challenges due to the global pandemic both in their work and personal lives. Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace business is not immune to the effects of COVID-19 either. Like our customer’s flight departments, we are facing many decisions to control costs and to modify the way we work to ensure we all remain safe and healthy, and that we will be there to serve you when the flying returns to a level of normalcy.

Many customers have chosen during this period of minimal flying to proactively complete any necessary maintenance on their aircraft. Virtually overnight, our behind the scenes teams have learned to work remotely to ensure that logistics, IT infrastructure and digital services remain robust to support your business needs. Our front-line customer support and service teams, such as our On-Wing Service mobile repair team, 24/7 Operational Service Desk, Regional Customer Managers, Technical Help Desk, and Spare Parts Administrators, and many more remain ever vigilant to assist in supporting maintenance activities.

Andy Robinson, SVP Customers and Services - Business Aviation, Rolls-Royce, said: “In the past 30 days, our On Wing Service team has performed multiple mobile repair jobs, all while observing the appropriate social distancing and clean, safe working practices. In fact, we have fulfilled every customer field service request, except where travel was forbidden. As our missionized operators and humanitarian flights continue to operate, we are pleased to report that through our 24/7 support we have achieved zero missed trips despite the challenging logistical situation at this time.”

We are carefully listening to the immediate concerns of our customers and have developed strategic ways that we can partner with them through the challenges that their flight departments are facing. This includes preservation guidance, proactive maintenance planning or the extension of lease engine terms.

As part of our IntelligentEngine vision, we are also further expanding the use of immersive Virtual Reality technology for customer training. The latest addition to the remote training programme is an instructor-led distance learning course, providing a comprehensive overview of the construction, design and operation of the Rolls-Royce BR725 engine that powers Gulfstream’s current flagship G650 business aircraft family. After completion of this comprehensive two-day training course, participants will be able to service the engine and undertake non-routine maintenance.

In the spirit of service readiness, we are thinking strategically about what may be needed as restrictions are lifted, and flight operations will be resumed. We are taking action now to ensure that we will have the necessary resources on hand and ready. Of course, we will have our teams properly equipped with personal protective equipment and social distancing protocols in place to support our customers in person as needed.

But we don’t stop there. The comprehensive development and flight test programme of the Rolls-Royce Pearl 700, that powers Gulfstream’s brand-new flagship G700, is progressing well.

Also, in keeping with our altruistic nature, we have also repurposed some of our teams to support the global effort to defend against COVID-19:

• A global Rolls-Royce team has been working with medics and engineers and has developed, tested, and put into operation a 3D-printed face shield to protect front line staff from frequent exposure to aerosolised COVID-19. Within approximately two weeks, the team has moved from concept to prototype to production of at least 200 units per day. More than 5,000 units have been delivered so far form our sites in the UK, the US and Germany.
• We play a crucial role in the Ventilator Challenge UK consortium focused on boosting the UK's supply of ventilators. Our role is to lead the development and execution of a parallel supply chain to feed assembly lines for the Smiths ParaPAC 300 ventilator.
• Rolls-Royce has invited a group of leading companies, such as IBM, Google Cloud, The Data City and Truata, to collaborate on Emer2gent, a new alliance of data analytics experts challenged with finding new, faster ways of supporting businesses and governments globally as they recover from the economic impacts of COVID-19. Emer2gent will combine traditional economic, business, travel and retail data sets with behaviour and sentiment data, to provide new insights that will help get people and businesses back to work as soon as possible by identifying lead indicators of economic recovery cycles. Businesses small and large around the world, as well as governments, can use these insights to build the confidence they need to take early decisions, such as investments or policies that could shorten or limit the recessionary impacts from the pandemic. If any of you would be interested in participating in this, please let us know.
• In collaboration with the United Kingdom Trade Unions, Rolls-Royce developed a stringent health and safety regime that enables employees to keep working during the coronavirus emergency. The plan has been recognized as the benchmark for handling COVID-related measures, and “a template that other companies could follow.” We are sharing “best practices” with our Authorized Service Centres to help with what ideas could be implement in their own health and safety protocols.

“Rolls-Royce is determined to be available for our customers when flying fully resumes and we intend to do whatever we can to ensure that our industry leading Services are ready for when you need us,” Andy Robinson added.