GO Aero
India to make French plane engine parts
Every Boeing to have an Indian part.
Few people realise the actual depth of Indian manufacturing. One has to visit an international air show like the one in Paris to see how many Indians are present in the industry.
Last week I met up with Gautam Maini and got to hear first hand about his son Kushal Maini winning the Formula 1 race this year. The Mainis are what you would call an automotive family. Engineering runs in their DNA. Gautam’s other siblings Chetan Maini and Sandeep Maini have both excelled in engineering. They built the Reva electric car way before Elon Musk entered automobiles and have been making aerospace components way before China managed to make anything aeronautical.
Courtesy Gautam, I got to visit Maini Precision – the Indian company that has a 25 year track record in aerospace parts and just entered a mou with aircraft makers Safran and Pratt & Whitney to make parts of their jet engine.
It was a delight to meet the young energetic team – a perfect combination of young enthusiasm and seasoned HAL veterans. The youngsters move so that they can make heavens fall. The grey haired veterans make sure that the planes don’t. Every single Boeing plane manufacturer today has at least one component from Maini and at least three from India. For things like the floor plate of the Boeing Dreamliner or the gaskets of the Airbus – India is sole source. The Air India Boeing which crashed in Ahmedabad was “Maini free” though. Their engine parts started going in a full year after the ill fated aircraft was made.
Maini aerospace has recently merged with Raymond engineering best known for JK files. Gautam Singhania is another automobile enthusiast as is Shiv Khemka whose family partners the Mainis in SUN Mobility. I was first directed to Chetan Maini by our IIT Vishwaguru Padma Sri Ashok Jhunjhunwala who was all praises for their engineering prowess. And then again by the IIT Alumni Council Distinguished Fellow for Advanced Manufacturing Taron Mohan who insisted I spend a day each with TANEJA AEROSPACE AND AVIATION LIMITED and TAAL Tech and then figured out how Maini would fit into the jigsaw puzzle with HAL, NAL and everyone else. It was well worth it.
The most difficult part of a plane are the jet engine turbines. They get so hot that ordinary steels would melt. That is why they are made of a nickel based alloy called Inconel. Maini specialises in engine components and does USD 35 million per year of aerospace fabrication. They started off 25 years ago as an OEM to OEMs – which means they made parts for companies which made sub assemblies for cos like Boeing and Airbus.
But this year they so to say, broke through the glass ceiling and signed up two direct OEMs – the USD 25 billion Safran of France which employs a 100,000 people (imagine how much they pay for their vacations) and Pratt & Whitney – another leader in mid sized engines.