The only way to keep 100 percent of your customers happy is to have their aircraft available 100 percent of the time. Rolls-Royce Business Aviation is creating an array of customer support services and digital capabilities to ensure it can deliver on that goal.
It’s incredible how private aircraft usage continues to set records worldwide. For example, according to FlightAware data, for the first week of June 2022, business aviation flight hours in the U.S. were up 64 percent over the same period last year.
And it seems there’s no ceiling to that growth. In a new study conducted by WSJ Intelligence and VistaJet, 87 percent of respondents said that their time is very valuable. The majority also agreed that flying privately is a “driver of efficiency and success.”
With over 7,400 business aviation engines in service worldwide and a 100 percent aircraft availability corporate goal, Rolls-Royce Business Aviation is investing huge amounts of time, money, and talent into developing a portfolio of service offerings to ensure that customer aircraft deliver the dispatchability their owners demand.
Promises made. Promises kept.
Of course, it’s a lot easier to promise 100 percent aircraft availability than to deliver it. However, everyone at Rolls-Royce Business Aviation is up to the challenge every day.
“What’s unique about Rolls-Royce is that we have a separate unit with a dedicated service organization set up to address the special needs of our business aviation clients,” states Rolls-Royce Business Aviation SVP Customers and Services, Andy Robinson. “Our powerful services infrastructure is supported by our relentless drive to never let a customer miss a planned trip due to an engine problem.”
With a business aviation history that spans 65 years, thousands of engines, and millions of flight hours, the company has seen every problem an aircraft owner can face. And it has created an array of tools and services to solve every one of them as quickly and safely as possible.
At the forefront of its promise is Rolls-Royce Business Aviation’s global network of strategically located Authorized Service Centers (ASCs). It’s the largest group of its kind in business aviation.
“We have over 75 ASCs with key maintenance providers worldwide, enabling the fastest response times to our customers’ needs,” Robinson says. “The powerful service infrastructure of the ASCs is complemented by our On Wing Services team, global spares support inventory, and even lease engines. All are available from strategic locations around the world for quick response to AOG needs.
“In situations that require on-wing repairs, our goal is to have the technicians with tools and parts on-site in under 16 hours no matter where the aircraft is positioned,” Robinson continues. “Of course, a lot of coordination and information sharing has to happen quickly for us to achieve that goal.”
Sharing information is the key to success.
“Our 24/7 Business Aviation Availability Center (AAC) ensures that all the moving parts, from logistics to spare parts to our On Wing technicians, work like a perfectly tuned machine— a new Rolls-Royce Pearl-series engine, for example,” Robinson says. “At the heart of this are our purpose-created digital capabilities, which are tailored to our specific needs.
“They’re basically task-management tools that connect all of the relevant work streams and make visible the status and required actions related to AOGs, and urgent service restorations,” he adds. “Additionally, they provide situational awareness via a customized map detailing all of our recovery activities which is available to the entire team. We have also connected these tools to our airframe partners operations center so they can get a live overview of what we are working on.”
The goal, Robinson says, is to give the Rolls-Royce Business Aviation team the tools and information it needs to provide the aircraft’s owner with real-time information regarding the return-to-flight status. It’s been proven repeatedly that timely information enhances the customer’s trust and confidence.
Rolls-Royce Business Aviation is also making considerable investments in expanding its array of remote engine monitoring and diagnostic capabilities.
A healthy engine means a happy customer.
“Exploiting digital technologies to further enhance reliability and our customers’ experience is key to achieving our 100 percent aircraft availability goal,” Robinson states. “We recently introduced a new engine health monitoring system, which includes an advanced engine vibration health monitoring unit [EVHMU].
“This unit can monitor over 10,000 data points in an engine’s operation, that when analyzed could give us advance warning of a potential problem,” Robinson says. “Being able to detect problems before they occur allows us to proactively change parts, thus avoiding an AOG situation before it happens.”
Robinson also says that regarding Rolls-Royce’s new Pearl engine family, the company is taking the benefits of digital health monitoring further by offering advanced remote engine diagnostics and bidirectional communications.
“Both of these capabilities make the Pearl series the first IoT [Internet of Things] enabled aero engine family,” Robinson explains. “We’re continuing to increase the sophistication and capabilities of our digital technologies.
“In fact, the digital tools our teams are now honing, from robotics to cloud-based analytics in big data, will play an increasingly expanding role in delivering exceptional levels of aircraft availability, as well as peace of mind for our global customers,” Robinson says.
How customers play a crucial role in their own success.
Robinson explains that the company’s array of new digital tools has been developed and implemented in close association with the members of Rolls-Royce Business Aviation’s Corporate Customer Council (C3).
“For example, customers have told us that they would like to see all the tools they interact with in one place,” he says. “And to that end, we’re developing our Customer Portal, which is a one-stop shop that combines access to all the various digital elements they use to interact and transact with us, and they can do it on any device.
“It’s very customer-friendly and intuitive to navigate, with alerts and notifications for any updates such as a newsflash or technicalpublications, EHM [Engine Health Monitoring] report, or advisory about their engines,” Robinson adds. “It can be easily tailored to deliver any type of information the customer wants to receive.”
Delivering the right data to the customer, having the right AOG support in the right location, and having the right tools to solve any need are all critical to Rolls-Royce Business Aviation delivering on what many outsiders believe can’t be done—achieving its overall corporate goal of “100 percent averted missed trips.”
Bad news for the naysayers: the company reached that goal this past March. But it’s not resting on its proverbial laurels. “We’re pleased to have reached our goal in March,” Robinson says, “but we won’t be satisfied until we reach it day in and day out. Our pursuit of perfection continues.”