$10k–$15k / hr
Narrow-body AOG
Published industry estimates put an A320/737-family grounding at USD 10,000–15,000 per hour, or roughly USD 240,000–360,000 per day.
$25k–$40k / hr
Wide-body AOG
A grounded A350/787-class aircraft is estimated at USD 25,000–40,000 per hour (USD 600,000–960,000 per day); a 747F freighter runs USD 30,000–50,000 per hour.
$5k–$15k / hr
Business jet AOG
Business jets are estimated at USD 5,000–15,000 per hour, or about USD 120,000–360,000 for a full day on the ground.
$11bn+
Industry-wide supply chain drag
IATA puts the 2025 cost of supply chain disruption above USD 11 billion, with engine problems alone grounding hundreds of aircraft — which is why spares lead time, not labour, usually dictates recovery time.
Figures are drawn from the published sources listed at the end of this article. Permit lead times are indicative and set by each civil aviation authority.
Why the first ninety minutes matter
In an AOG, the repair is often a small fraction of the total downtime. The rest is spent establishing what is actually wrong, locating a serviceable part, obtaining authority to spend, moving an engineer and part to the aircraft, and clearing the customs, permit and handling steps that movement requires.
All of those activities can be started before the defect is fully confirmed. Teams that wait for certainty before acting lose the flight schedules, freighter connections and duty windows that would have made a fast recovery possible.
Run the tracks in parallel
A functioning playbook opens several tracks simultaneously, each with an owner and a reporting cadence back to a single coordinator.
- Technical: confirm the defect, the applicable procedure and whether any approved deferral applies.
- Parts: identify serviceable sources and, in parallel, the fastest lawful route to move the part, including documentation.
- People: identify the approved engineering capability nearest the aircraft and the travel, visa and access requirements to get them to it.
- Aircraft and crew: protect the next rotation — reposition, substitute or re-crew before duty limits force the decision.
- Passengers and cargo: recover the payload's purpose, which is often achievable long before the aircraft is serviceable.
- Station: confirm parking, power, hangar access, opening hours and any handling constraint that will affect the work itself.
Remove the authority bottleneck in advance
The single most common avoidable delay is waiting for approval to spend. Pre-agreed thresholds, a named after-hours approver and a standing decision rule for expedited freight convert hours of internal correspondence into minutes.
The same applies to supplier arrangements. Terms negotiated calmly in advance are better than terms negotiated at 02:00 with an aircraft on the ground and a client waiting.
Know your stations before you need them
A station capability map is unglamorous and repeatedly decisive: for each aerodrome you regularly touch, what maintenance capability exists locally, what tooling and ground equipment is available, what the customs clearance path for an urgent part looks like, what the operating hours are, and who answers the phone at night.
With that map, an AOG at an unfamiliar field becomes a known problem with a known route. Without it, the first hour is spent discovering the basics.
Communicate cadence, not optimism
Early fix estimates are usually wrong, and a missed estimate costs more trust than the delay itself. The better discipline is to communicate what is confirmed, what is being pursued in parallel, and the exact time of the next update — then hold that time even when there is little new to report.
Clients tolerate technical events. What they remember is whether they were kept informed by someone who clearly owned the recovery.
How we work it
Earotine coordinates AOG response as a parallel-track logistics operation: technical liaison with approved maintenance organisations, parts movement and clearance, engineer travel, station access, and payload recovery — under one coordinator with a fixed update cadence.
Maintenance work itself is performed by approved organisations. Our contribution is the coordination, movement and communication layer that determines how much of the downtime is actually spent fixing the aircraft.