Beca Wins Supreme Award at NZEE

Air New Zealand is the leading Oceania maintenance, repair and overhaul service provider for narrow-body aircraft. There are insufficient numbers of any one such narrow-body aircraft in the southern hemisphere to justify a stand-alone facility for single aircraft models, as exists in the northern hemisphere.

Beca was issued with a challenging brief to design a set of mobile maintenance docks to service 12 different aircraft from two different manufacturers’ ranges, with 4 different wings, powered by 6 different engine types, each configured differently to suit individual operators’ requirements.

The resulting concept has enabled maintenance staff to work on a variety of aircraft using electro/mechanical screw-jacks, telescopic and trombone sections, roll-out panels and parallelogram stairs. Drawbridges allow the wings to be removed while the docks are in position, and retracting tail dock towers enable tail fin removal using the hangar overhead crane.

The docks were designed from Beca’s Christchurch office and fabricated by Southern Cross Engineering in Christchurch. "The maintenance docks are our hangar masterpiece", says Air New Zealand’s base manager at Christchurch, Viv De Beus.

The Sustainability and Clean Technology category at the awards was won by Beca in partnership with Dunning Thornton for the engineering design of the Merdian Energy Building on Wellington’s waterfront. A wealth of cutting-edge green building features was incorporated into the project, and it was the first completed building in New Zealand to be awarded a 5 star Green Star rating.

Auckland’s Northern Busway project won the Transportation Infrastructure category, with a project team comprising Beca, Opus, Aurecon and Fletcher Construction.