HELICOPTER ACQUISITION
GEARING UP FOR A NEW HELICOPTER
At some point in your aviation career, you might be tasked to become part of a team to help in determining
what new type aircraft your organization should acquire and put into service. I was recently part of such a team and was tasked to help evaluate various helicopter replacement models for our organization. Here are some of my experiences I would like to share with you. Whatever your expertise level is, you can get a compelling and practical review of every major aircraft buying phase through research and/or purchasing tools to help with your plan. These planning tools cover information such as: • Evaluation of aircraft needs • Defining key missions and analyzing alternatives • Aviation finance • Trading aircraft • Selling aircraft • Writing the acquisition plan
An aircraft replacement plan can take several months or
even years to accomplish. Regardless of the time line you have, the same thought process needs to apply. Although this was all important information for the plan
overall in determining what aircraft best suited our mission needs, what I didn’t find were planning tools to help me figure out how this would affect the maintenance department. The best advice I can share with you is to leave yourself as much time as you can afford to do this. I’m not going to go into every detail about my experience; I figured it would be best to just cover some experiences that will affect the maintenance department and its personnel.
How will we support the new aircraft? What we needed to ask ourselves was what maintenance can and cannot be handled in house. For maintenance or components that needed to be outsourced, did we have all
Edward Jerin | Contributing Author 28
HelicopterMaintenanceMagazine.com April | May 2014
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