Kerry Lynch stepped into the role of editor of the&nbsp;Aviation International News&nbsp;monthly magazine in May 2022 after serving with&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;for eight years. She joined&nbsp;AIN&nbsp;in December 2014 as a senior editor covering Washington and business aviation news. She has also served on Convention News teams, including as editor of&nbsp;HAI Convention News. Lynch previously spent 25 years with Aviation Week. During her time there, she reported for and later steered&nbsp;The Weekly of Business Aviation, oversaw business aviation content on the&nbsp;Aviation Week Intelligence Network, served on the&nbsp;Show News&nbsp;staff, and held roles as the Washington columnist for&nbsp;Business &amp; Commercial Aviation&nbsp;and&nbsp;Overhaul &amp; Maintenance&nbsp;monthly magazines. In 2021 she was honored with the National Business Aviation Association Platinum Wing Award for lifetime achievement in journalism and was the 2004 recipient of the National Air Transportation Association’s Aviation Journalism Excellence Award. She also has been a recipient of an Aerospace Media Award for business aviation (2022) and NBAA Gold Wing Award (2003). Lynch graduated from The Ohio State University with a bachelor of arts in journalism.

Editor, AIN monthly magazine

Kerry Lynch

Bombardier manufactures a variety of business aircraft models, provides engineering, and aircraft maintenance services.

After years of expansion, innovative approaches, and the addition of more support products, Bombardier is well on its way toward achieving its targeted $2 billion in annual revenues from its aftermarket segment by 2025. But it reached that cadence a year earlier than planned, already topping $500 million for the first time in quarterly results in the second quarter. This number is poised to keep growing.
For Bombardier, the overarching drive is “making sure that we are the first choice to our customers when it comes to products and services and maintenance,” said Paul Sislian, executive v-p for aftermarket services and strategy at Bombardier. “We want to offer the best value proposition. It’s got to be fast, reliable, convenient, and easy. That’s the most important thing.”
Growing the aftermarket segment has been a major focus for the Canadian airframer as it strives to “bring our airplanes home.” Over the past decade, the company has embarked on numerous expansion projects that culminated in 1 million sq ft coming online over the past two and a half years. It has also meant concentrating on an inventory to have the right parts in the right places, building on AOG support, and enhancing mobile response teams (MRT).
Further, this has resulted in proactive new support programs such as the Smart Link Plus health management service. "We've shown the market that we are fully focused on our customer experience, and we continue to grow on that momentum.”
Bombardier is accomplishing this by “making sure that we're in the right places around the world with our global footprint. We keep expanding our footprint whether it's brick and mortar, or if it's MRT trucks, or it's land stations.”
Sislian cited as an example the recent commissioning of a line station in Perth, Australia, with another in Sydney coming in December. The company expects to open its next full-service center in Abu Dhabi by mid-2026. This follows the openings of centers in Miami and Melbourne, Australia, and major expansions of operations in London and Singapore in recent years.
“We just keep expanding our footprint as our customers need because we need to make sure that we have the right capacity in terms of our population,” he added, noting that this evolution will continue into the future. “As the fleet continues to grow, we need to make sure we can service all of those aircraft,” Sislian added. “We still see a huge amount of growth in front of us.”
To support its growth, Bombardier also needs to hire the right technicians with the appropriate skill sets so the company can “actually have the capacity to serve our customers when they need us,” he added.&nbsp;This involves a lot of recruiting events and job fairs around the world to ensure that the company can hire within the local region.
“It's also working with local schools and universities and technical colleges to make sure that we can have the right people coming through the schools, and when they finish their education as aircraft technicians, they come to Bombardier,” he said.&nbsp;“It's not just looking at who's in the industry, but how do we make sure that we keep the pipeline full of schools coming to Bombardier?”
This is critical not only for staffing the new and expanded centers, along with MRT teams, but also for ensuring that the company’s call centers are accessible around the clock throughout the year. Bombardier plans to hire another 150 to 200 technicians and engineers on the support side this year alone, he noted.
<h2>Steering a Global Supply Chain</h2>
Sislian also pointed to the company's efforts to keep its parts properly stocked, which is not an easy feat for any of the manufacturers given the ongoing issues throughout the supply chain. He took pride in the fact that Bombardier, which topped the ratings in AIN’s annual <a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/2024-08-01/ain-product-support-survey-2024-aircraft">Product Support Survey</a>, led the category of parts availability.
To support its global reach, Bombardier operates three major hubs in Chicago, Frankfurt, and Singapore. “We want to make sure that we have the right parts in the right place so that when our customers have an emergency, they can count on us. It's all about the continued presence—and expansion of the presence—of Bombardier so that we will always be the first choice to our customers.”
He added that Bombardier has done a lot of work to tackle issues involving parts availability and distribution. “It's not perfect,” he conceded, but the company has taken many steps to address those issues. “That’s working very, very closely with our suppliers…whether it's for the OEM side or the aftermarket side.”
Bombardier views its suppliers as partners, he noted. “With that in mind, we work very closely with our partners to ensure that we can have the right relationship and the right supply coming to us.”
The company also is “investing heavily” in inventory management technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), to better manage inventory replenishment and distribution. Working with local universities to develop the right algorithms over the past two years, Bombardier is “learning every day how this AI technology is helping us,” he said.
“What we're focusing on is all about how do we create intelligent, predictive algorithms that will help us with our replenishment strategies globally, because there are multiple locations. You have to make sure you have the right part in the right place at the right time all the time. There's still a lot to do, but we have seen the fruits of that.”
This has resulted in an improvement in off-the-shelf inventory performance, so “we’re not overstocking or understocking.” In addition, the AI technology with inventory management helps ensure that Bombardier has more predictability on service times.
He called the technology embryonic and said as an industry, there will be much to learn about optimization of material flow and inventory management.
<h2>Predictive Maintenance Pays Off</h2>
Along those lines of having better predictability is Bombardier’s <a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/2023-04-19/bombardier-smart-link-plus-okd-challengers-globals">Smart Link Plus</a>, a health monitoring service. Introduced in 2020, Bombardier—teaming with GE Aerospace—offered the boxes for free, not including the installation or service costs. Sislian called the program one of the most important technological changes the company has undertaken. “It’s all about moving from a reactive maintenance to a predictive maintenance.”
Bombardier has certified the boxes on most of the Global and contemporary Challenger models, with the last ones—the Global 5500 and 6500—nearing approval in upcoming weeks, he said. “Then all of our fleet of aircraft will have the possibility [and] the availability of adding a Smart Link Plus box. What that really does is it adds substantial value to the customer and adds substantial value to us.”
Having a <a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/2024-04-03/vref-smart-link-plus-enrollment-boosts-aircraft-value">Smart Link Plus box boosts aircraft value</a>, he pointed out, and it enables customers to see the trends of their aircraft so they can predict their support tools. “With the Smart Link Box, the aircraft is self-diagnosing itself and sending information real-time to the home base.”
About 13% of the fleet is equipped already “and we're just starting to roll this out,” Sislian said. “Over the next two or three years, there's going to be a massive influx of aircraft,” either coming out of the factory with it or undergoing retrofits.

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