Textron Aviation came to Europe with new CEO Ron Draper, who’s looking to ramp up the manufacturer of Cessna and Beechcraft airplanes’ service capabilities in the region and place greater emphasis on its legacy Cessna Citation line. Draper, who assumed the chief executive role from Scott Ernest in October, is a 20-year veteran of Textron Inc., including 15 years at Cessna and Textron Aviation. The former Army Black Hawk helicopter pilot and West Point graduate was most recently senior v-p of integrated supply chain at Textron Aviation.

His first order of business in Europe is an expansion of the parts warehouse in Dusseldorf, Germany, that will increase available parts numbers to nearly 35,000 items. “We have a pretty covered [service] footprint on the European continent, but we’re expanding our parts in Europe,” Draper told AIN. “We’ve heard our customers say they want even more availability and faster response times, so we’re doubling the size of our warehouse in Europe to put more parts on the continent, to maintain our class-leading service we feel we enjoy with our customers today.”

The expansion is set to open in the third quarter, including all six service center parts rooms, the company said. “The additional space keeps us ahead of growing demand and ready to support our customers at any time,” said Brad Thress, Textron Aviation senior v-p of parts, programs, and flight operations.

Textron Aviation’s European parts warehouse expansion highlights continued investment in customer support as the service centers have remained busy with the increased flying in the region. This included the opening of a line station last year at London Biggin Hill Airport. Textron Aviation provides support for all Beechcraft, Cessna, and Hawker aircraft in Europe at its company-owned service centers in Doncaster, Düsseldorf, Paris Le Bourget, Prague, Valencia, and Zurich, and offers line service at Bremen, Cannes, Geneva, Nice, and Stuttgart, in addition to London Biggin Hill.

Textron Aviation leads the European market with more than 1,800 jet and turboprop aircraft operating in the region—accounting for 50 percent of the turboprop fleet and 43 percent of the jet fleet there. The company takes a holistic strategy to support aircraft regionally with centrally located, company-owned service centers and parts distributions centers that are bolstered with mobile service units and AOG response through its 1Call center.

It is constantly evaluating facilities and placement of assets, said Textron Aviation senior v-p of global customer support Kriya Shortt. The 1Call center has helped produce important data to better assess the placement of parts and mobile service units. In addition, Textron Aviation is evolving its approach to support, she said.

“We’ve been investing differently and changing our approach because our customer base wants to have a relationship and an experience,” Shortt said. “The quality is something we’ve always been something we’ve been able to provide, but that touch point and that relationship along the ownership continuum become more and more important to our owners as they seek relationships with the OEM.”

Part of this means asking different questions, she said, digging deeper to get a fuller understanding of what the customers will want and need. This enables the company to better craft products and services that will address owner requirements, Shortt explained.

Existing Citation customers have been asking for faster refresh cycles and more upgrades of their legacy jets, which is something that “we maybe slowed down on” in the past decade, Draper said. “We’re going to keep the new products going—that’s our future and those products are great—but I think we’re going to put a little more emphasis on the customers that own a CJ whatever, pick your model, who need a software upgrade or additional things from us out of our engineering department, so we’re going to assign some more engineers to address sustaining engineering and make sure those customers are taken care of.” To that end, Draper moved parts support and programs to Thress’ responsibilities.

While the company’s fleet numbers 1,800 in Europe, the installed base of Textron Aviation jets and turboprops swells to more than 14,000 globally. As that base grows with new models such as the Citation Latitude and Longitude, as well as the Denali and SkyCourier, service and support become even more critical, Draper said.

Textron Aviation has long been preparing to bring its Longitude to market, Shortt said. “We’ve been really busy because we want that entry-into-service to go exceedingly well across our customer base.”

Working across the service network, the company has been training technicians, ensuring the right tooling is in place. The company has begun to build up a parts stock and has stood up what Shortt called “Team Longitude” to address engineering technical questions. In addition, field service technicians were embedded with development teams to become familiar with the aircraft. Those technicians will move into the field as the aircraft enters service in the third quarter.

Textron Aviation has concentrated on hiring to support these efforts, she said, and in particular, has had a significant emphasis on cultivating the next generation of the workforce. This includes addressing schools to help young people understand that aviation trades are a viable means to develop skills and foster a long-term career. Textron Aviation further offers programs to help its workers seek a degree or other education so they can advance in their knowledge and career.