American Airlines Shows Off Vision 2025 Purchases

Monday, January 8th 2007, 9:05 pm

By: News On 6

One thing that will be sticking around in Tulsa is the American Airlines Maintenance Base. One big reason is Vision 2025. The public funding package provided more than $22-million to buy equipment for the base.

News on 6 business reporter Steve Berg says American Airlines has just about finished buying all their equipment. But this is just the beginning of what that equipment will do for them.

Everywhere you look around the American Airlines base in Tulsa, there are Vision 2025 signs to show what the Vision money has purchased.

"The Vision funding has provided tremendous capabilities here," said Steve Glime with American Airlines

Product Manager Steve Glime showed us just a few of the 77 products they've bought over the past 3 years. From the relatively modest, like a $15,000 lathe that machines parts, to the more extravagant like a $1.9-million machine that checks digital flight data displays, a job that used to be done by the display's manufacturer, at much higher cost.

"We save approximately $45,000 on each unit that we test, that we've brought in house," Glime said. "It's paid for itself in less than a year."

And that's the key requirement for anything they buy with Vision money, return on investment or ROI. Either it saves money or it brings in new work.

The gantry is both the biggest and the most expensive Vision purchase. The 24,000-square foot, $2-million piece of equipment is used to overhaul engines for the 737. They go in one end and are completely disassembled.

"And then on the backside and coming around the other side, this is more of less horseshoe shaped, the engine is reassembled," said Glime.

It's also work that used to be done by the manufacturer. Now American does the job themselves, and they're in position to do engine overhaul for other airlinesâ€™ 737â€™s.

Without equipment like this, and the additional work it's brought in, American says the workforce here would have been cut by some 2,000 jobs. As it is, the job loss stayed in the hundreds, and they say they're in a position to grow.

American set a goal of $500-million in cost savings and new work. In a few weeks, they'll reveal if they met that goal.