Pratt & Whitney Canada (P&WC) has committed to a new agreement with Hawker Beechcraft Services to support its engines on both Beechcraft King Air twin turboprops and Hawker business jets. The engine maker will provide Beechcraft’s service division with comprehensive support including repair, hot section inspection and overhaul for the PT6As on the King Air family, as well as for the Hawker 1000’s PW305B turbofan, the Hawker 4000’s PW308A and the Hawker 400A’s JT15D-5.

The work will be done at Pratt & Whitney Engine Services’s overhaul and repair facility in Bridgeport, W.Va., and also at P&WC’s main repair and overhaul center in St Hubert, Quebec. The latter facility is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year.

P&WC customer support vice president Raffaele Virgili told AIN that the manufacturer’s Customer First product support network is the key to ensure that its operators can operate their engines as cost effectively as possible. “We focus hard on issues such as how quickly we can dispatch a part in the case of an AOG situation, for which we have a 24-hour response target and also how we organize mobile repairs,” he explained. “Our Customer First team coordinates everything to get the operator back in the air as soon as possible, whether that means shipping a part or arranging a rental engine.”

Today, P&WC has more than 50,000 engines in service in some 200 different countries. “Our worldwide network is our big strength and not many companies can say they have [customer support] positions in every continent of the world,” said Virgili. “We don’t rely entirely on our own footprint; we also work with third-party FBOs and we have 100 field representatives around the world and seven parts distribution points.”

A big push at P&WC today is to conduct more customer support transactions using the Internet, with the banking industry as its model for this trend. “We want to give our customers more autonomy this way and we want to see 80 percent of all transactions done via the Web,” said Virgili.