Engine stands rarely make headlines. But ask anyone who has needed one urgently and couldn’t find it. Daiva Žemaitė, Managing Director at Magnetic Enginestands, makes the case for treating stand availability as a planning priority – not an afterthought.
There is a particular kind of operational problem that announces itself at the worst possible moment.
The engine needs to come off. The shop visit has been brought forward. An AOG situation is developing.
And somewhere in the chain of calls that follows, someone discovers that the stand they expected is unavailable, the rental provider has nothing nearby, and repositioning lead times are longer than anyone anticipated.
“Stand shortages appear suddenly,” says Daiva Žemaitė. “Even though the underlying causes have been building for months.”
A Structural Shift
The engine market has become constrained in ways that were not true five years ago. Shop visit volumes are rising. Turnaround times are longer than historical norms. New-generation engine issues have increased unplanned removals.
When an engine stays in the maintenance cycle longer, the stand stays tied up longer too – reducing circulation and creating localised shortages even when the total stand population has not materially changed.
The leading airlines, lessors, and MRO providers have noticed. Stand planning is receiving more attention than it once did. But the shift is uneven.
Many organisations still treat stands as a secondary logistics item – until a shortage makes the cost of that assumption visible.
The New Engine Problem
The pressure is sharpest around the engine families already causing the most disruption elsewhere. LEAP stands face high demand driven by a large and growing fleet and increasing maintenance activity.
GTF (Geared Turbo Fan) pressure can be even sharper – unexpected durability issues and extended shop times mean more engines needing stands simultaneously. Trent 7000 demand is lower overall, but localised shortages still occur depending on regional stock positioning.
The stands themselves have not changed. The expectations around them have.
“The question is often less ‘how many stands do you own?’ and more ‘how quickly can you get one where I need it?'” says Daiva.
Rapid deployment, short-notice availability, regional positioning – these have become the metrics that matter.
One Assumption Worth Changing
Ask Daiva what she would change about how the industry thinks about engine stand planning, and her answer is direct.
“Most companies still treat stands as a logistics detail – something to arrange at the end. In reality, stands are part of maintenance capacity.”
A missing stand can delay an engine’s return to service just as effectively as a missing shop slot or a spare engine shortage. The difference is that stand availability rarely appears in the planning conversation until it is already a problem.
“A stand is not just equipment,” she says. “It is part of the capacity that keeps engines moving.”
The organisations getting this right are the ones planning stand availability alongside engine activity – not separately, and not last.
For everyone else, the shortage tends to arrive without warning. The causes, as Daiva notes, were there all along.
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