Aircraft painting business grows by 50 per cent at S7 Technics

S7 Technics' workshop team painted a Utair’s B737 using the state-of-the-art Aerobase base coat/clear coverage system (S7 Technics

The workload of S7 Technics’ Mineralnye Vody-based aircraft paint shop grew by a factor of 1.5 this year. From January to March 2018, the facility – which is part of S7 Technics Holding, the engineering and maintenance arm of Russia’s second biggest carrier S7 Airlines – re-delivered 18 freshly painted aircraft to their operators, six more than in the same period last year.

“We managed to increase our shop load during the season [September to May] from a two and a half-to-three average, to four aircraft per month,” reveals Danil Naumenko, deputy director of the S7 Technics Mineralnye Vody base.

According to the manager of Russia’s largest independent maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) enterprise, an extensive efficiency improvement programme is the reason behind the increase.

Among recent notable paint jobs was a contribution to Utair Airlines’ re-branding exercise. In May, S7 Technics’ Mineralnye Vody-based paint shop redelivered a Boeing 737-400 to the Russian carrier – painted in its new corporate livery – following on from the autumn 2017 inauguration of the new Utair brand styling.

S7 Technics’ workshop team painted the aircraft using the state-of-the-art Aerobase base coat/clear coverage system developed by Akzo Nobel, the world’s leading producer of such coating materials. The task required more than 300 litres of paint.

“We are very pleased to have contributed to the upgrading of the image of Utair. The paint shop enjoys a long and successful history of co-operation with the carrier. Notably, it was a Utair Boeing 737 which was the first fully independent painting project for S7 Technics’ paint shop back in 2014,” Naumenko says.

Along with Utair are several other leading customers in the Russian and broader CIS air travel market, such as Aeroflot, Rossiya Airlines, S7 Airlines, Air Astana and others that have benefited from S7 Technics’ (previously Engineering Holding) paint shop expertise.