Pilatus engineers recently developed and certified a new PC-12 Master Maintenance Plan to give greater flexibility with regard to the timing of required inspections and maintenance. The plan applies to all PC-12 Series, and will reduce required maintenance labour by 20-40%.
Based on a detailed analysis of in-service fleet experience of over 6.8 million hours, scheduled maintenance intervals have been extended from 100/150 hours to 300 hours. Pilatus PC-12 operators flying 300 hours per year will see a reduction in scheduled maintenance labour time of approximately 20%, while high utilisation operators flying more than 800 hours annually will save up to 40%.
Ignaz Gretener, Vice President of Pilatus’ General Aviation Business Unit stated: “We know that low direct operating costs are one of the most important reasons for purchasing a PC-12. Finding ways to continually lower DOCs in order to maintain that benefit has always been a high priority for us.”
Custom maintenance intervals
The new Maintenance Plan lists all scheduled maintenance tasks with maximum intervals, allowing operators to package these tasks according to their own specific operations. For operators who want a pre-defined inspection programme, the new maintenance policy also provides the tasks pre-packaged in six different intervals – 300 Flight Hours (FH), 300 FH/12 Months (MO), 600 FH, 600 FH/12 MO, 1200 FH/12 MO, 2400 FH/24 MO where the flight hours or calendar time intervals are understood as “whichever comes first”.
Gretener continued, “We know that Pilatus can only be successful if our customers are successful. That is why we remain intensely focused on helping PC-12 operators to get the most value from their aircraft, and on retaining that value throughout the entire period of ownership.”
Further reliability-enhancing improvements and customer-specific requirements have also been incorporated in several areas.
The PC-12 NG will be on display to the public at the Pilatus indoor stand at this year’s European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition (EBACE) from 29 to 31 May in Geneva. The 2018 Pilatus demo model sports an eye-catching livery designed by Swiss paper-cutting artist, Esther Gerber. It reflects two essential values embodied by the PC-12: Swiss craftsmanship and perfection.