Niall Cunningham

With customers including the King of Bahrain, as well as some of the most luxurious airlines in the world, Eirtech Aviation aims to be the best at what it does: providing aircraft finishing, engineering and asset-management services for clients worldwide. The company has built its reputation on quality services and excellence in customer experience. This has helped it to expand internationally and to continue to grow in the past six years.

CEO Niall Cunningham has more than 20 years of experience in the aviation industry, and has been with Eirtech since 1997. “"I started in the aviation industry working with Trans Aer Airways,"Niall says. "“What we were doing was wet leasing aircraft. I worked on the introduction of the Airbus A320 into Ireland at that point in time, primarily working commercially on wet leasing of aircraft. After that, I relocated to Shannon, and we set up a company here doing aircraft refinishing work. That company subsequently became a Lufthansa Technik company called Lufthansa Technik Painting Shannon. In 2009, I led a management buyout to take over the company."”

Since the management buyout, Eirtech has expanded its reach in Europe, including purchasing new facilities in the Czech Republic and Italy. "“After the management buyout, we acquired a lease on a Dublin facility and we had that in operation nine months later, which was additional wide-body capacity for the company,"” Niall explains. "“In terms of what we were doing in Europe, we were looking at being able to cater for large fleet sizes and being able to cope with our increasing customer listing. We had the opportunity a year later to purchase two branded facilities in Ostrava in the Czech Republic, and they are two narrow-body facilities —purpose-built, state-of-the-art buildings. We started operating those successfully in central Europe."”

The full interview with Niall Cunningham is featured in the July edition of The CEO Magazine.

Click here to register for a subscription.