Welcome to the home of Engineering & Maintenance at Virgin Atlantic

Our Engineering teams are based at our Heathrow Hangar and in our Operations Control Centre and their main purpose is to keep our fleet of aircraft in fantastic condition. This involves managing and controlling thousands of maintenance tasks on our aircraft, including when and how we should do this. The requirements are varied, ranging from filter changes, lubrication of mechanical parts, inspections of our cabin and engine changes to detailed structural inspections.  We have a diverse team that is broadly split into disciplines that cover Cabin Interiors, Systems, Avionics, Structures, Powerplant, Landing Gear, Technical Records, Planning, Engineering Operational Control, Maintenance Programmes, Reliability, Asset Management, Design and Technical Publications. Compliance and Safety are at the top of our priority list, along with achieving industry leading reliability. Our teams undergo extensive training to gain the required approvals and work closely with Airbus, Boeing, Rolls-Royce, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and many other suppliers. 

Once our Engineering teams have defined the required tasks for accomplishment, our maintenance teams are ready to complete the work on our aircraft. Maintenance is broadly split into line maintenance, light hangar maintenance and heavy hangar maintenance. Line maintenance is where our engineers meet our aircraft after every flight and perform the necessary checks and inspections to prepare it for its next flight. It's a dynamic, fast-paced environment to ensure everything is ready to enable a safe on time departure. Virgin Atlantic have a hangar at Heathrow airport, where we perform light hangar maintenance. This enables us to complete more complex tasks or those tasks that require a controlled environment or specialist tools and equipment. Virgin do not perform heavy hangar maintenance in-house, we work with our suppliers and partners to perform these significant maintenance events. Virgin's maintenance engineers are highly trained and qualified to perform their duties, which requires a regulated licence from the Civil Aviation Authority to release aircraft for flight.

We also hold our own training approval, which includes qualified instructors, so we can deliver many technical courses in-house to all of our engineers. Delivering our own training gives us maximum flexibility, but also ensures the standard is exceptionally high.   

Whether it's nuts, bolts, sealants, tyres, wheels, brakes, toilets or jet engines, our supply chain team have it covered! Modern commercial aircraft, such as our Airbus A330/A350 and Boeing B787 fleets, are made from hundreds of thousands of parts. Our Engineering and Maintenance teams need instant access to a multitude of parts, consumables, expendables and tooling, to be able to complete the required tasks to keep our aircraft in top shape. This is truly a global logistics operation. Similar to Engineering, our Supply Chain team is split into sub-teams, comprising parts planning and inventory management, financial inventory management (aircraft parts are high cost items), purchasing, component repairs, warranty and something called an AOG desk. AOG stands for Aircraft on Ground, it's an industrywide term to denote that an aircraft is waiting for a spare part before it can fly. The AOG desk is a 24/7/365 function that can expedite the acquisition of any part, globally and if necessary use any means possible to deliver the part to the required location in the shortest time possible, even chartering another aircraft to deliver the part!