Aviation Ground Support Equipment Testing

Any GSE used to raise, lower, support, or position aircraft, components, or loads is lifting equipment under the regulations, whether powered or manual.

In practice, that spans the entire maintenance operation, including the tripod jacks under the airframe, the axle jacks at the wheels, the wing and body jacks supporting a gear swing, and the shoring holding everything steady while the structure is opened up.

It extends to the component side too. Engine hoists and cranes that remove and install engines, the stands that support them during transport and maintenance, bootstrap kits that lift an engine off the aircraft’s own structure, and the hydraulic lifting tables that handle APUs, avionics, and components all fall within the duty.

If a failure could drop an aircraft, an engine, or a person, it needs to be examined.

GSE must undergo thorough examination every 6 or 12 months, depending on the equipment type, carried out by a competent person, exactly as our LOLER inspection service provides across every other industry. Aviation adds its own pressure to the schedule, because a jack that misses its examination date grounds itself, and anything sitting on it stops moving too.

Defects must be reported immediately and the equipment taken out of service, and that is precisely how we work. Any defect found is categorised on the spot, reported to you straight away, and the item is withdrawn before it can be used again. Nothing ambiguous is left under an aircraft.

Where an examination calls for it, or after repair, modification or an incident, GSE is proof load tested to confirm its capacity. Jacks are proven under controlled load with calibrated measurements, hoists and cranes are tested through their full working range, and hydraulic systems are checked for creep and drift that quietly turn a rated capacity into a hoped-for one. The methods follow our wider proof load testing service and are applied with an understanding of how aviation equipment is actually used.

Our group’s aviation pedigree runs deeper than inspection. We have designed and manufactured complete load cell jacking sets that enable the stress jacking of 747 aircraft, built to strict time and budget constraints, with calibration traceable to national standards. When your jacks are examined by SWL, they are examined by the people who build and test this equipment.

Aircraft maintenance runs to unforgiving schedules, and downtime on the equipment that supports it multiplies quickly. We examine and test at your facility, hangar or airfield, scheduling around checks and turnarounds so the examination happens while the equipment would be idle anyway, and grouping assets so a single visit covers as much of the fleet as possible.

Every examination and test is documented and certified, giving you the records that quality systems, auditors and insurers expect, with next due dates tracked so a lapsed certificate never takes a serviceable jack out of the game. Calibration on our own test equipment is traceable to national standards, which means the figures behind your certificates stand up wherever they are scrutinised.