LARA magazine features Airbourne Colours
Painting and Coatings | LARA magazine | December 24/January 25 issue
LARA editor, Rob Munro spoke with Simon Cracknell at Airbourne Colours, on what painting and coatings companies are doing to speed up turnaround times to deliver aircraft to operators, all while reducing waste.
Airbourne Colours and the aircraft paint industry continue to focus on ways to speed up the painting process and limit waste.
Suppose we look at speeding up the painting process. This can be done in several ways.
Airbourne Colours continues to maximise the available time, by working on the aircraft around the clock, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as soon as the aircraft arrives.
This of course ensures that the aircraft is maximised from a downtime perspective.
The second way to speed up the painting process is by utilising the best available technology. One of the critical trends towards supporting this is using Base Coat Clear Coat Technology, which allows paint systems to be overcoated within two hours instead of eight hours – plus with older high solids technology.
Limiting waste and hazardous waste has continued to gain traction over the past 10 years. Several products on the market and used within the aircraft paint arena have reduced or eliminated the use of hexavalent chrome, which has traditionally been the primary corrosion inhibitor in primers and pre-treatments.
Airbourne Colours continues to focus on improving our energy footprint by starting to operate out of brand-new facilities, which are far more efficient and allow an easier transition as technology comes online to support this.
Our brand-new paint facility opened in October 2024 out of Teesside International Airport and is already providing significant reductions in energy use.
The aerospace industry takes time to transition on to new products, including the painting industry, due to the time it takes to test and approve products.
However, there are products out there now that will continue to support ways of speeding up the painting process and limiting waste coming down the pipeline – whether this will be UV-cured sealant that cures instantly to paint systems, offering increasingly thinner film builds and extensions to the life of the paint on the aircraft.
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