The tech and trends driving growth in aerospace MRO

Featuring leaders from both the private and public sectors, The Business Times roundtable on aerospace maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) delved into topics ranging from navigating post-pandemic growth to adopting new technologies.

These are edited excerpts from the event on 3 Sep 2025, Wednesday.
 

Roundtable Panellists

• Zheng Jingxin, vice president for mobility and industrial solutions, Economic Development Board (EDB)
• Iain Rodger, managing director, component repair Singapore, GE Aerospace
• Yip Hin Meng, executive vice-president and head of aerospace MRO, ST Engineering
• Moderator: Derryn Wong, transport correspondent, The Business Times
   

Q1: Singapore has remained a key global aerospace and aviation hub. What factors have enabled it to rebound in areas like MRO and air traffic?

Zheng Jingxin: There are three broad reasons why we have seen the industry rebound quite strongly in Singapore.

First, there has been a deferred retirement of the current in-service fleet, and this is coupled with a bit of the growth that we are witnessing in Southeast Asia.

In-service fleets now have a longer operating lifespan, and this requires more complex, higher-quality MRO work.

And Southeast Asia is one of the few bright spots in the world where you can still have high single-digit economic growth. This is one of the key drivers that we are fortunate to have: where the region is growing well, and there’s more demand for air travel.

Second, Singapore has managed to retain and even grow our comprehensive “nose-to-tail” MRO sector.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we kept our airport open, and we provided very strong support for workers and jobs using the Jobs Support Scheme.

Last but not least, Singapore takes a very long-term perspective to infrastructure and R&D (research and development) investments. We are expanding our airport with Terminal 5, which will increase the airport’s total capacity to 140 million passengers per annum, up from up to 90 million today. It will come along with industrial land for MRO, aftermarket services, and logistics.

On the R&D front, we are investing in new technologies, such as MRO repair development for some of the new platforms: the aircraft as well as the engine platforms.

There are advanced materials investments such as composites. We are also investing in unmanned aircraft systems as well as electrification.
 

Q2: What trends are you seeing across your MRO operations in the region when it comes to demand, delivery timelines, and customer needs? How are you responding to that? 

Iain Rodger: The Asia-Pacific is going to dominate the airline industry within the next 15 years. Singapore manufacturing in July had increased year-on-year by about 7 per cent, of which aerospace, mostly MRO, is 22 per cent of that growth.

We work very closely with our customers, to understand their demands on turnaround time, where their fleet is operating, and how we can respond more proactively to that. And that’s leading us to invest in Asia-Pacific.

We announced over a billion dollars in MRO over the next five years for Asia-Pacific in particular, US$45 million (S$58.2 million) last year and US$75 million this year.

And we announced earlier this year that we will be establishing a new technology development repair centre at our Seletar facility.
 

Q3: How has GE Aerospace addressed the supply chain bottlenecks? 

Rodger: The supply chain is having some growing pains as we come out of the pandemic. Flight Deck, our proprietary lean operating system, has enabled us to work with our priority suppliers to improve quality and delivery.

In the second quarter this year, for example, we saw a 10 per cent increase in output from our priority suppliers; and overall, the supply chain delivered over 95 per cent of its committed deliveries.
 

Q4: What innovations are you most excited about in the MRO space? Where do you see real-world impact on improving efficiency, safety, and resilience in industry operations here? 

Rodger: Jim Collins in the book ‘Good to Great’ opined it really well, where he said: “Thoughtless reliance on technology can be a liability.” So we’re implementing technology where it will make a difference in terms of safety, quality, and delivery and cost.

Everybody’s talking about AI (artificial intelligence) right now. GE has implemented AI with its products and services over the last decade. We are one of the biggest AI patent holders in the industry and work very closely with our customers on predictive maintenance, moving more from reactive to predictive.

Yip Hin Meng: We see automation and AI as a transformation for the industry going forward. And we tend to look at it from a few buckets: personal productivity; operational efficiency; product enhancement; and how AI can help us develop new products and services.

Across the industry today, technology is at various states of progress.

For personal productivity, there are options such as ChatGPT and Copilot. If you look at operational efficiencies, you get into the realm of AI agents for operational research, which is still a little bit in the proof of concept stage. We’ve been dabbling with different models to figure out how we would use it.

For product improvements, we are looking at how to tap into AI to search for service bulletins and engineering databases more effectively than engineers can today.

Using these technologies for developing new products and services is still pretty far out. I think we are looking at operational improvements at the moment.

Some of our engine shops have developed a smart vision learning machine to inspect hardware, which has reduced the technicians’ very tedious work of inspecting thousands of nuts and bolts.

But I think as technology moves along, and it will move along, there will be a need for us to work with the regulators.
 

Q5: What innovations or technologies are going to make the biggest change in the industry over the next few years? 

Zheng: Aerospace is one of the leading adopters of future mobility technologies.

On product design and development, for example, there is additive repair, which is a form of manufacturing in itself. Every turbine blade that is sent for repairs has a different deformity that can be repaired using additive manufacturing technology.

There’s also process and repair development. It’s about how you use AI for predictive maintenance and digital MRO.

For example, ST Engineering has partnered the Institute of Technical Education for an engine MRO training facility that can simulate a real-world environment.

The students get to work on AI, augmented reality tools, and robotics. If you think about the youth of today, those are the interesting technologies that actually resonate with them.

There will also be business model innovation, such as in the delivery of after-market services. We’re also seeing developments on the next-generation air traffic management front.

Collectively, these future mobility technologies will help companies become more competitive, add value to operations, and – more importantly – create jobs that Singaporeans will want to take up.
 

Q6: Do you think that advanced air mobility will play a big role in the region and Singapore’s future?  

Zheng: The sector has faced some challenges in recent years, but we are watching it very closely. We are seeing pockets of momentum coming up in the US, with companies like Joby, and in the Middle East and China. At Japan’s Osaka Expo, we were starting to see some of that momentum going.

We’re working with advanced mobility companies on how to use Singapore as a base to build up CASE (connected, shared, autonomous, and electric) technologies, to advance their business in the region while waiting to gain commercial traction in the coming years.

Yip: Unmanned technologies is one area that ST Engineering is looking at. We have been looking at delivery of products rather than people, ship-to-shore.

It’s about surveillance, combining video analytics and AI into the drone that inspects power lines outside of Singapore.

You can imagine, if you need to inspect power lines over long distances, the technician will need to get to the pylon, climb up the pipeline, and look. But now with drones, we’re actually using that to inspect the spacing between the wires.

We are also partnering the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore to adapt the regulations that allow us to operate unmanned vehicles within Singapore.

Rodger: GE Aerospace’s power generation may be a trifle large for unmanned aircraft. But we’ve recently acquired and partnered with a company that produces smaller engines that support unmanned aircraft.

And when we talk about unmanned aircraft, the market and its growth – all of that requires MRO. So how do you continue to develop the people who are going to be able to take engine manuals or product manuals, and translate them into providing a service?

Because at the end of the day, for our company – and I’m pretty sure it’s the same for our players in the industry – services are what delivers 70 per cent of our revenue.
 

Q7: Are there any major non-market forces that you can think of that may affect the industry?  

Yip: We’re going to need to keep an eye on disruptions due to tariffs and sanctions. The pandemic was a non-market factor but the entire market was affected. So these are the kind of Black Swan events that we need to watch out for.

And how do you be nimble in moving your business? Because of the global nature of our business, we could move customers’ assets around to be maintained in different areas. That gives us a little bit of flexibility. But maybe in a Black Swan event, all of us are in the same boat.

Rodger: We can scenario-plan until the cows come home. But by its nature, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in a Black Swan event.

But what will be useful are the general lessons that we learnt: the adaptability, the retaining of talent in very ingenious ways.

Working with EDB and the Ministry of Manpower, we came out ahead of industry growth after COVID-19, because we transferred work into Singapore during the pandemic, with their support.

We typically advocate for zero tariffs in the aerospace industry. It’s good to see recent examples of the US-European Union and US-UK trade deals, where the US’ partners have secured zero tariffs on aircraft and aerospace parts
 

Source: The Business Times ©️ SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.