MRO Middle East: Crane's lift in the region

The firm, which developed the unit in partnership with Airbus, said it will soon to be certified and it is planned for standard production on all new A320s in the third quarter of 2010.  

“This will be certified in the next month and a half and should be in production service in the September timeframe, so bring it to this show is very timely,” said Martin McCarthy, Crane vice president – Europe & Middle East speaking at the show yesterday.

He added: “We brought this to the Dubai air show last December and the reaction was excellent. The airlines we have spoken to have said this is an opportunity to improve the landing gear control reliability on their fleet.”

The LGCIU is designed to sense the position of landing gear and landing gear doors, flap disconnect status, and cargo door position. It then transmits this data to other aircraft systems including the Flight Warning System and Central Maintenance System.

Crane said that the enhanced LGCIU offers significant improvements over the previous LGCIU, most notably a large improvement in reliability – 45,000  MTBUR (Mean Time Between Unscheduled Removals) – leading to substantially lower operator costs. In addition, the enhanced LGCIU is more accurate, lower weight, fully interchangeable with the older model, and provides improved fault isolation.

McCarthy said that the firm is targeting the whole supply chain serving the Airbus A320 family of aircraft.

“We want to talk to anybody operating the A320 and who may be looking to buy spares or is looking at the retrofit option. The retrofit case is extremely good.”

The enhanced LGCIU will be available for retrofit on all in-service A320 series aircraft in 2010.