Iron Maiden star welcomes a real piece of heavy metal to St Athan (From Barry And District News)

Iron Maiden star welcomes a real piece of heavy metal to St Athan

11:48am Thursday 1st November 2012 in News By Chris Seal

IRON MAIDEN'S lead singer Bruce Dickinson welcomed the first customer aircraft to land at St Athan this week as part of his aircraft maintenance business.
A Boeing 757, owned by Icelandair and operated on behalf of Russian airline Yakutia, landed at the site on Monday. (October 29)
It is the first customer aircraft to be taken in by Cardiff Aviation Limited for repair, maintenance and storage at the company's St Athan Aerospace Enterprise Zone site.
"The 757 is a straightforward maintenance job requiring the removal and replacement of an engine, which is about as ideal a job as possible with which to start commercial aircraft maintenance operations at Cardiff Aviation - big, reasonably complex, and a clear illustration of our capabilities," said Bruce Dickinson.
It comes after the arrival of two Canadian water bombers, as reported in the Barry and District News, last month.
"The 757 will join two 'ducks' in our hangars - 'water bombers' which have been used to help fight forest fires in the Eastern Mediterranean," said Bruce.
"They're Canadair CL-215s owned by Buffalo Airways in Canada, and we'll be maintaining and storing them for the winter or until they're needed to deal with the next fire fighting emergency. I flew one of them part of the way back from Turkey."
He added: "But back down to earth, and we've got a great deal going on at Cardiff Aviation. Firstly, there's actually been quite a bit of not-very-sexy engineering type stuff going on in our HQ, but that's the bread and butter.
"But we've had to wait for the approvals and paperwork to allow us to get on with the big and highly-visible work. We only got the keys to Twin Peaks in July, we've been flat out on paperwork, approvals, certificates and what-have-you, and we've actually got to where we are pretty well on target.
"In due course we'll reveal the work schedule for the next 12 months, but suffice to say it'll be on or close to business plan - which is reassuring and satisfying in such a volatile economic environment."