Three years ago this month, Lindon, Utah-based Intermountain Turbine Services acquired the LT101 engine type certificate (TC) from Honeywell Aerospace. The move was a natural progression for the 30-year-old MRO that made the LTS101 and LTP101 engines its primary focus when it formed in 1993.
Designed and originally produced by Lycoming Turbine Engine Division, the LTS101 powers variants of the MBB BK117, Airbus AS350, Bell 222, and the Avicopter AC311, while the LTP101 is used in the Piaggio P.166 and Riley Rocket 421. Today, there are about 600 of these engines in service.
At the time of the acquisition, Intermountain Turbine president Darryl Christensen saw the move as an opportunity to increase its support beyond the company’s Honeywell Authorized Service Center operations with the goal of re-energizing the engine line by lowering the cost of ownership.
In addition to the type certificate, Intermountain Turbine acquired all the drawings, intellectual property, inventory, and vendor contacts for the engine line. It added these to its large pool of certified inventory and rental engines, two test cells, and tooling, all housed in a 30,000-square-foot facility.
A mountain of challenges
A lot has happened in the three years since the acquisition. Intermountain Turbine has hired an additional 15 people and maintains a steady pace of servicing LTS101 engines with the large supply of parts and spare engines the company already had in stock and received in the acquisition. The company has also been able to add around 20 engines into service as a direct result of its TC acquisition, Christensen said.
The largest obstacle keeping Intermountain Turbine from growing and expanding services, let alone reducing down time and cost of ownership, is the supply chain.
The company has most of the parts in stock to bring another 150 engines into service. However, a few hard to secure parts are holding up the line. In the meantime, the company is focusing on keeping existing customers flying, mainly through parting out spare engines in the company’s stock, Christensen emphasized.
The choke point right now for Intermountain Turbine is expediting newly established suppliers for critical parts such as details for gas producer (GP) rotors and power turbine (PT) rotors. While the type certification acquisition agreement with Honeywell included the OEM initially supplying Intermountain with PT rotors and GP rotor details, high military orders have taken precedent at Honeywell. Intermountain has not yet received much of the stock, thus making the expedition of new vendors a paramount priority, Christenson said.
“While we have access to the vendors who worked with Honeywell, we had difficulty negotiating our own contracts,” Christensen said, adding the small size of Intermountain compared with Honeywell and corresponding smaller orders put the MRO low on many vendors’ priority lists.
Additionally, high tariffs on China and constantly fluctuating tariffs on other countries are putting pressure on the company. “The tariffs are making those parts very costly so we are actively seeking additional suppliers that can help us out,” Christensen said. “I would like to bring a lot of it back to the US, but that takes time. It is very difficult to bring on a new supplier, especially for critical components like the blades.”
Christensen emphasized securing new vendors requires multiple steps and shipping items back and forth. For instance, GP blades are first cast. Those raw castings must then go to Intermountain Turbine for validation and approval before being sent to a machine shop, then off for coatings, then returned to Intermountain for first article inspection, testing, and validation on a test engine. Only after passing full inspection and engine testing can the new vendors part go into production and be installed on a new engine. Each step can take many months.
The light at the end of the tunnel
“We’ve located some really good suppliers and it’s looking promising,” Christensen said of the company’s progress. “We have an engine ready to go on the test platform. We’re just waiting on those last components to arrive and hope to start running our first validations this quarter.”
In the meantime, Christensen is constantly purchasing LTS101 engines to help maintain a back stock of rental engines and parts as turnaround times extend to between 60 and 90 days as opposed to the company’s targeted 45 days, again due to the supply chain.
The challenges aren’t slowing Intermountain Turbine down. Christiansen said the company recently added in-house grinding and rotor assembly capabilities to cut those processes out of the supply chain and is actively hiring more skilled employees.
“It is our place to keep our customers flying for as long as possible,” Christensen said. “That’s what we’ll continue to do.”
