Saving Engines and Lives Across Australia

March 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of StandardAero’s Brisbane, Australia engine Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) facility. Opened in March 2013, the Brisbane location is a Pratt & Whitney-authorized PT6A Designated Overhaul Facility (DOF) that maintains distribution rights on certain P&W engine models. The 22,000-square-foot facility also provides field service support for a number of additional P&W engines, including the JT15D, PT6T, PW100, and PW300.

StandardAero’s Brisbane facility has enjoyed significant growth over the last decade, and its current staff of 63 highly-skilled employees—the collective PT6A experience of which exceeds five-hundred-years—serves operators across the whole of Australia and Asia, and offers full MRO support germane to no less than 55 discrete PT6A variants.

Principal among StandardAero’s compulsions to open the Brisbane facility was the company’s desire to provide support for the Royal Flying Doctors Service (RFDS)—a non-profit, Australian air-medical organization that provides primary and emergency health-care services to persons and communities scattered across the 3.5-million-square-nautical-mile vastness of Australia’s desolate interior. The Royal Flying Doctor Service operates a fleet of 79 aeromedical/air-ambulance aircraft which includes PT6A-powered machines the likes of Pilatus’s PC-12 and Beechcraft’s King Air family of twin-turboprops.

Currently, RFDS aircraft and engines account for approximately 35-percent of the Brisbane shop’s business, and the facility recently marked completion of its one-thousandth RFDS work order.

StandardAero provides PT6A MRO support to four different RFDS entities—Central Operations, Queensland Section, South Eastern Section, and Western Operations—across a variety of engine variants, including the PT6A-42, -52, -60A, -67A, -67B and -67P.

The Queensland section of the RFDS recently presented the StandardAero Brisbane facility a plaque commemorating the “awesome effort” the MRO’s service teams invested in overhauling, in only fifty-days, a PT6A-60A engine by which one of the section’s King Air 350 aircraft is powered.

StandardAero Brisbane’s vice-president and general manager Stephen Leigh stated: “It is truly gratifying to reflect on the achievements of the Brisbane facility team over the past decade. Our employees embody StandardAero’s commitment to exceeding customer expectations and we are proud to support a broad mix of operators from across Australia and beyond—not least the Royal Flying Doctors Service.  We look forward to continuing to serve the needs of our customers and to celebrating our next ten years.”

Encompassing more than 55-years of reliable turboprop experience, StandardAero is the world’s largest independent Pratt & Whitney authorized PT6A Designated Overhaul Facility (DOF). The company supports the global PT6A operator community through four DOFs located in North America, Europe, Africa, and Australasia. The aforementioned are backed by a global network of six service centers and over twenty dedicated mobile repair technicians. StandardAero provides PT6A operators a nose-to-tail suite of services, including repair schemes, re-engineering STCs, engine exchanges, rentals, and Engine Condition Trend Monitoring (ECTM) analysis.

FMI: www.standardaero.com