Blog

AOG Procurement Is Changing. Are You Ahead of the Queue?

Autumn 2026 is the most pressured sourcing environment aviation procurement teams have faced in years. And the operators who don't adapt fast are about to find out exactly what that costs. Here's what's happening right now. Write-up backlogs deferred through peak summer season are hitting MRO shops simultaneously across the Northern Hemisphere. Icing season is six weeks away. Lead times on the components everyone needs — pitot heat assemblies, bleed air valves, pneumatic de-ice components, hydr

AOG Aircraft On Ground: The Real Cost of a Grounded Plane

Started out moving cargo pallets, long before I ever touched an AOG shipment. The jump from "urgent" to "aircraft on ground aog" urgent took a while to fully register. A grounded aircraft doesn't just sit quietly and wait. It bleeds money — lease payments that don't pause, crew schedules that unravel, passengers rebooked onto other carriers who are, somewhat awkwardly, often direct competitors. Some estimates put the cost of a widebody sitting idle at well over ten thousand dollars an hour, and

$10M Per Engine. Why Aviation Maintenance Won't Get Cheaper

$10 Million Per Engine. Why Aviation's Maintenance Crisis Isn't Over — It Just Changed Shape The groundings are easing. The bills are getting worse. That's the headline nobody in aviation wants to talk about in August 2026. GTF groundings dropped 25% in the first half of the year. LEAP-related groundings are approaching zero. The worst of the engine crisis, by every visible metric, looks like it's behind us. Except the money tells a completely different story. Engine spending across major US

AOG Aviation: How a Missing Part Grounds an Entire Fleet

A widebody sitting at the gate long after its scheduled departure, engines cold, passengers already rebooked — and the whole reason comes down to one part that isn't in the hangar. That's aircraft on ground aog in practice. Not a phrase from a training slide. A live problem somebody has to fix in hours, sometimes less. There was a European operator, mixed Airbus and Boeing fleet, needed a specific brake unit for an A320. Nothing in their regional stock matched. A partner in Frankfurt had it, bu

Rolls-Royce Eliminated AOG. What About Everyone Else?

Rolls-Royce made headlines this month. Their CEO announced the company has "effectively eliminated aircraft on ground" cases for operators of Rolls-Royce powered widebody aircraft — backed by a 13% increase in large-engine maintenance output and a 35% surge in engine refurbishments in the first half of 2026 alone. It's a genuine milestone. And for airlines operating the Boeing 787 Dreamliner or Airbus A350, it's exactly the kind of news procurement and maintenance teams have been waiting years

AOG Aviation: A Parts Supplier's View From Inside an AOG Call

I've spent years sourcing AOG aircraft parts for airlines and MRO shops. Long enough to stop being surprised by how ordinary the panic sounds once you've heard it a few hundred times. What does AOG actually stand for? Aircraft On Ground — three words that, on paper, sound almost administrative. In practice, it's the phrase that turns a quiet Tuesday shift into something else entirely. A plane can't fly. Every hour it sits there costs the airline real money, and somewhere a dispatcher is staring

What Really Happens When a Flight Goes AOG

Anyone who's spent time around ops control knows the feeling. A message comes in, three letters, and the whole tone of the shift changes. AOG. Aircraft on ground. It doesn't matter if it's a widebody sitting at a major hub or a regional turboprop parked at some outstation nobody's heard of — the moment that call goes out, priorities flip and everyone starts moving faster than they were five minutes earlier. I've worked logistics on the parts side for long enough to know that an aog flight isn't

900 Aircraft Grounded: The Aviation Parts Crisis Explained

The Aircraft Parts Crisis: Why 900 Aircraft Are Grounded—and How Airlines Can Respond Faster The aviation industry is facing one of its most significant operational challenges in decades. Around 900 aircraft worldwide are currently grounded—not because of technical failures or safety concerns, but because airlines cannot source the parts needed to keep them flying. This is no longer a temporary supply chain disruption. It has become a long-term structural issue affecting airlines, maintenance

POV: It's 2AM and You're Still Refreshing Your Inbox

t's 2am. Your aircraft is grounded. You've sent the emails, made the calls, and now you're just... refreshing your inbox. 😩 Nothing. Still nothing. Meanwhile, on AOG Today, an airline in the exact same situation just posted an RFQ. ⏱️ 10 minutes later, they had three quotes. Same hour. Same industry. Same pressure. Two completely different nights. Let's Sit With That for a Second Not "different suppliers." Not "different luck." Different process. One person is stuck hoping someone check

AOG: Three Letters That Change Everyone's Priorities

Spend any time around flight operations, maintenance control, or parts logistics, and you'll know the moment — someone says "we've got an AOG" and the whole room just... shifts. Conversations pause. Someone reaches for a phone. Nothing dramatic happens on the surface — no alarms going off, nobody shouting — but there's a weight to it. Hard to explain unless you've actually sat through one. AOG stands for Aircraft On Ground. That's the textbook definition. Ask anyone who's actually dealt with on