As Airbus marks its 30th anniversary in South Africa, Nam-Binh Hoang emphasizes that the priority continues to be providing more to customers and operators in the future.
“Our office in South Africa is made up of about 80 people,” explains Nam-Binh Hoang, Managing Director of Airbus in South Africa. Today around 500 helicopters are flying in South Africa and most of them were made by Airbus. Over the past 30 years, our team has continuously worked on enhancing the support of the fleet of operators throughout the sub-Saharan African region.”
High-performance skill sets are required to deliver in a region where the Airbus fleet performs a variety of operations from law enforcement, defence, mining, sightseeing tours, wildlife conservation and private business. The scope of operations is naturally reflected in the team’s activities, as Hoang explains: “We do helicopter sales, helicopter completion and maintenance, sales of spare parts, pilot training, technical support, CAMO services.”
The African continent presents a challenging environment for both helicopters and their crews. Beyond the heat, operators must contend with the demanding altitudes found in many African nations. For example, Johannesburg is situated at an altitude of 5600 feet and Kenya also features some very high operational environments. Thankfully, when conditions reach extreme levels of heat and altitude, Airbus helicopters continue to perform reliably. One model, in particular, the H125, is especially favoured by local customers, consistently proving its capabilities.
“I remember my first experience with an African customer was in Kenya,” notes Hoang. “They came straight up to me and told me ‘Your H125 works perfectly. It’s powerful and we can use it regardless of the conditions, wherever we need to operate. It keeps its performance in high and hot conditions. It’s an amazing helicopter.”
While the H125 may be the region’s workhorse, Hoang predicts that it won’t be long before the five-bladed H145 makes an impact. “Landing on the Aconcagua in Latin America proved that this is also a helicopter which is well suited for high and hot environments,” explains Hoang. “The BK117 is popular in several countries and the five-bladed H145 is a natural evolution of this platform for operators replacing fleets or new players entering the market.”
Hoang believes that for an office focused on local clients, a crucial indicator of the customer centre's success is the positive effect its activities have on operators. “We want to show that we can offer local support, from South Africa. Our approach is based on investing in what our customers need,” states Hoang. “For example, we are investing to have blade repair capability here in South Africa instead of having customers send their blades to France, Singapore or the US.” With global supply chain challenges ongoing, Airbus Helicopters in Africa invested in a stock collection, so that its proximity would reduce lead times for local operators receiving parts. Another initiative was to make maintenance kits available so that should operators decide to perform a 600/750-flight-hour inspection on their H125, they could order one line and get the whole maintenance kit, with the right quantity of parts.
For pilot training, a new virtual reality simulator, the first of its kind in Africa, will help pilots perfect their normal, emergency and special flight procedures whilst remaining safe on the ground. Hoang wants customers to expect increasing levels of quality service from his team and believes that proximity is vital to delivering on this promise: “We are not 10,000 km from their operations, we are their next-door neighbour, and they can find every service they need from here.”
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