A big unassuming hangar, at Archerfield Airport in Brisbane, is home to LifeFlight’s Heavy Maintenance base; this is where the company’s engineers work around the clock, to ensure every aircraft is ready to take flight, at a moment’s notice. “Here at LifeFlight, we have a real culture and work hard at developing a good work culture,” Engineering Operations Manager Michael Dopking said.

“We very actively train our guys from day one and we’re grooming them up, to become managers.”

One element of the job, which LifeFlight Australia has committed to performing in-house, is the complete service or ‘pull-down', of the organization’s fleet of helicopters. Pete De Marzi, Executive Manager of Engineering, explained the project sees a chopper dismantled, down to its shell. The maintenance project happens when the machine reaches four years of service. Due to the high volume of missions RACQ LifeFlight Rescue helicopters complete, this project coincided with the 2,400 flying hours service of the chopper, registered as XIL.

“A lot of places don’t do their own 139s in house, they outsource it, but we’re one of the few that actually do it ourselves,” Dopking said. “Very few engineers get the opportunity to do this type of work, where you see them pull the whole thing down to nothing.” The project takes around eight weeks and an estimated four thousand hours, to complete. In an effort to limit human contact during the COVID-19 pandemic, engineering staff were split into teams and even re-deployed to other bases, but Dopking said the workflow was never interrupted.

De Marzi said: “We are keen to make sure everyone knows everything, to the point where we rotate our engineers from the heavy maintenance base, out to our other bases – across Queensland – so that they get a taste of what to expect beyond the line and understand the contract.”