St Athan based Maintenance Repair & Overhaul (MRO) company, Cardiff Aviation, has been awarded a repeat contract by UK holiday airline TUI Airways UK (BY/TOM).
The contract gives TUI a flexible maintenance facility away from its main engineering line and will see Cardiff Aviation carry out work on TUI Airways Boeing 737-800, Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 – of which only 2 now remain in the fleet.
The maintenance will include return from lease checks on some TUI aircraft that have been leased out during the winter months to Canadian airline Sunwing.
Other work will include cabin reconfiguration, engine replacements and landing gear replacement.
The outlook for the Vale of Glamorgan based MRO have been improving after a tumultuous few years that had seen the company struggle to even pay staff, and more recently, it suspended a director and appointed restructuring specialist Joachim Jones.
The new contract comes after Cardiff Aviation had a successful 2018 working on TUI Airways aircraft at their Twin Peaks facility at St Athan and their flexibility clearly impressed TUI Airways enough to award more work.
A spokesperson for TUI Airways says: “We built up a good relationship with Cardiff Aviation last summer when we needed extended MRO capacity on a flexible basis. The team at St. Athan were extremely accommodating and completed all work to budget. We are therefore confident about placing an extended programme of inputs with them ready for our peak summer season.”
Cardiff Aviation was set up in 2012 by Iron Maiden lead singer Bruce Dickinson and with multi-million pound funding from the Welsh taxpayer through Business Finance Wales. After years of uncertainty and cutbacks, Cardiff Aviation is now recruiting skilled technicians from across the region and will hopefully start to create something like the number of jobs it promised when it originally set up.
