CFM's Open LEAP Network Still Runs 85% Of Shop Visits In-House

On June 30, Safran Aircraft Engines opened an engine shop in Querétaro, about 5 km (3.1 mi.) from an engine shop it already owned. The new building cost $140 million, covers 50,000 m² (538,200 ft.²), and is meant to handle up to 350 LEAP shop visits a year by 2030. The older one does CFM56s.

That distance is the most informative number in the announcement. Safran did not put its Central American LEAP hub near an airline, or near a customer, or near a port. It put the hub next to its own trained workforce — a Querétaro cluster now running four facilities, roughly 1,450 people, and an on-site training center pushing more than 300 inspectors and technicians into the pipeline every year.

Three weeks later, at Farnborough, CFM International signed an MoU with IndiGo covering more than 1,000 LEAP-1A engines for 510 Airbus A320neo Family aircraft, the largest LEAP order in its history. The engines were the headline. The clause that will matter longer sits further down the release, where CFM commits to help IndiGo stand up an engine MRO facility of its own.

Both events get filed under the same story, which is that CFM is expanding its maintenance network to keep pace with a fleet that has grown faster than any commercial engine program before it. That story is true. It is also unauditable, because the one figure that would let anyone measure it is a figure CFM has stopped publishing.

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