SWISS achieves painless aircraft redeliveries – on time, on budget – with FLYdocs

Only last year Swiss International Air Lines was operating a paper-based model to manage all its aircraft records. With a fleet of almost 100 aircraft and an average of 40 boxes – with 100,000 documents – per aircraft this was a hugely labour intensive, expensive and inefficient way of working. When the time came to redeliver the aircraft, it meant physically hosting the lessor onsite for weeks to go through the boxes and build the history as best they could.

As SWISS was about to embark on a major asset transition programme with over a third of its fleet, 34 aircraft, leaving over the next 3 years, things had to change. With a number of returns scheduled during 2016 and 2017, including big aircraft like the A340-300, and some at almost 20 years old, SWISS required a more effective way of working as well as extra support to get through the sheer volume of work involved.

“They also needed to adopt industry best practice to ensure these records were in the best possible condition in order to meet the criteria to return them off-lease or sell them on and realise their optimal commercial value”, underlines Adrian Ryan, CEO FLYdocs.

SWISS evaluated several providers and selected FLYdocs as it presented the most advanced and best value for money solution on the market.

“We began working on the major 2-year lease returns and sales programme to build audit and present the aircraft records in August 2015”, ads Steve Haxell, Technical director FLYdocs.

Key technical members of the FLYdocs team were based onsite between Basel and Zurich for the first 3 months to ensure the successful implementation, training and adoption of the system. The FLYdocs scanning team were also there, scanning and migrating all existing aircraft records and inputting them into the FLYdocs aircraft data and records management system.

Following the initial exercise, FLYdocs began the build and audit of records for 13 aircraft to help with the forthcoming redeliveries.

“We have already helped successfully redeliver three A340s to the lessors, making room in the fleet for the new incoming deliveries”, says Haxell. The process is now much smoother and SWISS no longer has to have the lessor onsite in Basel to review the records.

Werner Reiser, Senior Manager Phase Out Program at SWISS commented “FLYdocs is an excellent tool, which allows us to be prepared and in a proactive position instead of reacting to document findings from a lessor just before the physical inspection starts. The feedback from the lessors is always positive as they can review the documents online and on different remote locations. Thanks to FLYdocs we are in the position to redeliver our aircraft to the lessors within time and budget.”

Following the success of the FLYdocs implementation, effective team work and smooth redeliveries, FLYdocs is now also managing the return of six RJ100s. This project involves managing the full process and all parties involved.