5 December 2019: Air Astana and S7 Technics expand their partnership for base maintenance of Air Astana fleet.
The first in-house base maintenance C-check - 1- Check on Air Astana's Airbus A320neo was carried out in November 2019 with support from S7 technics team. The check was carried out at the airline's hangar facility at Almaty Airport under Air Astana's own EASA Part 145 certificate.
As a part of the C-Check preparation, S7 Technics called for an expert team of six professional Almaty - project manager, deputy production manager, head of the department and three engineers while Air Astana secured all appropriate approvals from aviation authorities along with preparation of its facilities and lining up trained staff.
"While Air Astana's staffs were working on their first C-check, S7 Technics' team supervised directly at the customer's facility in Almaty," Alexey Zimin, project manager at S7 Technics explains. "Our team did not perform any procedures on the aircraft, but they shared their experience and best practices on planning and executing actions, on coordinating actions between different departments and on filing reports."
This contract was a part of expansion of the on-going 5-year partnership contract signed by the two companies in 2018.
According to the MoU signed, S7 technics is providing assistance to Air Astana in developing their own competencies in performing base maintenance checks in Kazakhstan.
S7 Technics is also helping the airline build up MRO management system, train Air Astana's specialists during their internships both at S7 Technics' sites and at Air Astana's facilities in Nur-Sultan and Almaty.
"This is the first project of this kind in S7 Technics' history. But in aviation industry such cooperation, when a provider helps an airline develop its own competences, is not rare," notes Igor Panshin, S7 Technics' deputy general director for marketing and sales. "For an airline of Air Astana's calibre developing in-house capabilities for base maintenance is not a fancy, but a logical cost-saving measure. We believe that this partnership between Air Astana and S7 Technics really makes sense in this respect. The airline benefits from competent support from us, whilst we have won a valuable customer. While Air Astana's base at Nur-Sultan is building its capabilities in A320neo maintenance, we continue our cooperation in other ways, including heavy checks on other types of aircraft operated by the Kazakh airline, at S7 Technics sites in Russia."