The last few years have seen Leonardo Helicopters undertake something of a transformation of its customer support in North America. Since 2021, it has opened an $80-million, 60,000-square-foot (5,575-square-meter) U.S. training center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — mirrored on its facility in Sesto Calende, Italy; opened a temporary maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facility in Peter Prince, Florida; designed and built a 72,000-square-foot (6,690-square-meter) Florida Support Center to replace it in Milton, Florida; and over the last three years has doubled its network of North American Support Centers.
Leonardo’s first MRO presence in the U.S. was in the early 1980s in Philadelphia on the Northeast Airport.
“We had the majority of our customers here [in the northeastern U.S.], and there was also a good aviation network,” explained Maurizio D’Angelo, Leonardo’s VP of customer support and training, Americas. “Boeing was present here, Sikorsky was present here, so we thought that it was a good investment [to be] here in Philadelphia.”
Production work began at the Philadelphia site in 2004, and the Leonardo campus gradually expanded. In 2019, the first major off-site expansion was made with the opening of a 20,000-square-foot (1,860-square-meter) Gulf of Mexico Support Center in Broussard, Louisiana.
The Broussard facility provides Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) certified blade repair, spare parts and technical support services to over 700 Leonardo helicopters in operation throughout the Gulf of Mexico.
The same year that Broussard was established, Leonardo announced its intention to create a support facility at Whiting Aviation Park if its TH-119 was chosen by the U.S. Navy to replace the TH-57 Sea Ranger for its training program. The service announced the selection of the aircraft in 2020, and the first of 130 TH-119s — then named the TH-73A Thrasher — was delivered to the Navy in June 2021.
A Specialized Service
Today, Philadelphia contains production lines for the AW139 and AW119, as well as the MH139 for the U.S. Air Force and the TH-119 for the U.S. Navy. Last year, over 60 aircraft rolled off the production line. The site is also home to the AW609 test program and final assembly.
The MRO side of the house provides completions, customer support, maintenance, repair, and overhaul for the Leonardo fleet serving operators across North and Central America. It services the manufacturer’s entire product line: the AW189, AW139, AW169, AW109 and AW119.
One hangar is dedicated to MRO activity, with another hangar home to completion work. There are about 100 technicians on staff, allowing the ability to work on 12 to 16 aircraft at a time.
“We’re basically lifecycle: from the birth of the helicopter until its end life,” said James Helkey, director of maintenance, repair, and overhaul, and completions at Leonardo Helicopters. “We provide everything in between, from completion activity, overhaul, to all your rotables and components, normal maintenance, and any upgrades.
“We’re fortunate to have an onsite engineering [capability], so if you need an STC [supplemental type certificate] developed, we can do that in house, from the development to certification — the full process.”
These programs can range from the installation of mission-specific radios for air medical or law enforcement operations, to internal and external cameras.
There are many benefits to being an OEM’s MRO facility, said Helkey, from access to product support and design engineering on site, to special tooling.
“All the special tooling called for in our maintenance manuals, we have on site,” he said. “If I do not have it, I can have it within a couple of days from our headquarters in Italy or our partners.”
Another advantage the MRO has is a full overhaul capability on site that incorporates a test cell for the 109, 119, and all of its intermediate and tail gearboxes.
“We like to think of ourselves as a one-stop-shop,” said Helkey.
Building Expertise
The core of any company is its staff, and Leonardo “turned a corner” about five years ago to really focus on retention, said Helkey. Heads of department have increased their involvement with their teams to better identify their wants and needs, while the company’s compensation plan was recently revised. This led to the low turnover rate of just four percent last year.
“What’s we’ve built is a team that is cohesive,” said Helkey. “They’re all interlinked, they know what each other’s doing, so the experience has grown leaps and bounds in the last three to four years. We have a solid team that know how to get the job done, which has increased our efficiency, which we can then pass on to our customers.”
A partnership with a local trade school provides a good supply of newly-qualified technicians, who typically start out on the production side of the house before moving over to MRO. As with the wider industry, the military also provides a good pipeline of talent.
“With the things we’ve done in the last two years, the word of mouth has spread, so where two years ago, I would have 10 open positions, today, I think I have two,” said Helkey.
There are 25 engineers in the aftermarket engineering team, who work in coordination with the part 145 unit. Helkey noted that a lot of the prototyping work for the TH-119 was done by the MRO team, such as the instrument flight rules STC and the Genesys glass cockpit modification.
While completion activity has represented up to 70 percent of the team’s activity in the past, with the remainder being MRO, Helkey said he was trying to reverse that balance. To do so, the team has been working hard to improve efficiency to reduce downtime.
One of the ways to achieve this is through using different software that will allow technicians to spend more of their working day on the aircraft.
“The other thing that we’re working on in our overhaul shop is bringing in 139 gearboxes and doing all the overhauls in house,” said Helkey. “In Florida, we’ll have a 139 test cell. So we want to utilize that test cell to run our gearboxes so we can keep all the components that we maintain overhauled in the States, so they have no reason to go to the Italian facilities anymore.”
Predictive maintenance is also becoming increasingly important, allowing Leonardo to analyze the in-service fleet to give a clearer picture of when inspections are going to be required. This visibility allows it to better predict the requirement for materials and parts, ensuring they are in-house when they’re needed.
Helkey said the MRO has a “renewed focus” in meeting customer expectations.
“If the customer expects the aircraft to come in and out in six weeks, we need to beat six weeks or less,” he said. “Quite frankly, in our past, that wasn’t the case. The six weeks goal was, ‘Well, we’ll make it or we won’t.’
“Now, on day one, we pass that message to the team that this aircraft has to be delivered on a specific date, so we can all be on the same page to make that goal. The team knows if they need to work a couple extra hours because they know they’re not where they need to be on the plan, they do it without asking. It’s really a fundamental shift in mindset.”
A Second Home in Florida
The company’s new facility in Florida is in Whiting Aviation Park, just outside the naval base that’s home to the TH-73s. The site includes a 24,000-square-foot (2,230-square-meter) hangar with four large bays, a spacious warehouse for spare parts, a full-sized paint booth, a dynamic test bench, and a variety of back shops.
Joe Richards, general manager, Florida operations, Leonardo, said the facility will support all the helicopters in the south along the Gulf Coast — not just the Navy aircraft. However, he noted that the Navy fleet of TH-73s are expected to fly about 80,000 flight hours each year.
“With that comes a tremendous amount of logistic support, technical expertise and maintenance,” he said.
Christopher Lemieux, director of Americas network and capabilities at Leonardo, said the location in the Florida Panhandle was strategic.
“Obviously, the fleet concentration we’re going to have there with the Navy is huge, and we’re only about a five-hour drive away from the Gulf of Mexico and the entire fleet we have there, as well as a huge concentration of VIP customers down in Florida.”
Lemieux described the facility as offering a “huge move forward” in terms of capability development for Leonardo, adding a multi-model main gearbox test bench — a first for the company in North America.
“Having a critical mass of over 130 gearboxes literally just over the fence is very important, but when we combine that as well with the entire fleet we’ve got serving oil-and-gas, VIP missions in Florida, I would say probably almost 25 percent of our gearboxes in North America are within a five-hour drive from here,” said Lemieux.
In terms of support capability from launch, the Florida facility is fully equipped, but Lemieux said there is room for growth in the future.
“We’ve designed it in a way that’s going to allow for that, both in terms of warehousing capability, and then in terms of the overall hangar capacity as well,” he said. “From a back shop capacity, from an MRO capacity on components, we’re very well set right from the opening.”
The company had opened a temporary hangar at nearby Peter Prince Airport to gain its Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) part 145 certification and begin repair work, while the larger, permanent Whiting facility was being designed and developed.
“[Peter Prince] has really been a fantastic place for us to grow some roots down in the area, and build the team,” said Lemieux. “We want to move into that [Whiting] facility full speed, and we’re expecting to fill that place up very quickly.”
The company plans to start transitioning out of Peter Prince and into the Milton facility “towards the end of this year,” said Lemieux.
It’s clearly an exciting time for the manufacturer’s U.S. team — and its customers across North America. With proximity and capability at the heart of a renewed focus on customer support in the continent, there’s a lot to look forward to.