Complete Detail at Vienna (LOWW)

What does Complete Detail at Vienna include?

The package begins with an exterior dry wash or rinseless wash, depending on water rules and apron conditions, followed by clay-bar decontamination to lift bonded contamination—tree sap, industrial fallout, insect protein—that washing alone will not remove. We then apply a single-stage machine polish to restore gloss and prepare the paint for a durable hydrophobic sealant. Leading edges, nacelles, winglets and the cheat line receive individual attention; the belly and gear bays are cleaned and dressed.

Inside, every surface is detailed: leather is cleaned, conditioned and protected; carpets and soft furnishings are extracted or steam-cleaned; galley, lavatory and all hard surfaces are degreased, polished and disinfected. The flight deck is treated with no-touch protocols around avionics, and static ports and pitot covers are confirmed secure before we hand back the keys. You receive a photographic report documenting the state of the aircraft before we started and after we finished.

Brightwork—window frames, door handles, threshold plates—is polished by hand. The entire cabin and cockpit are then disinfected with aviation-approved agents, a step that matters when the aircraft has just come off charter or is about to welcome a new owner.

What changes at Vienna?

Vienna International sits at 600 feet elevation, 18 kilometres from central Vienna, and operates around the clock without a formal curfew—though night movements between 23:30 and 05:30 local are capped under a mediation agreement, and runway-direction availability is restricted from 21:00 to 06:55. The airport is fully coordinated at Level 3: IFR general-aviation flights require slots requested between twenty-eight days and four hours before the operation, arranged through your handling agent; VFR flights are exempt from slots but still need prior permission as published in the Austrian AIP.

Three handling agents are present at the airport: Vienna Aircraft Handling (the airport-owned FBO, available twenty-four hours with hangarage), Jet Aviation Vienna (twenty-four-hour operations, office hours 07:00–22:00, offering in-house exterior and interior cleaning) and Magnum FBO (an independent operator on the field since 2012). All three work from the General Aviation Center or General Aviation Terminal on the west side of the airport, about three kilometres from the passenger terminals. Because Jet Aviation lists aircraft cleaning among its own services, you will sometimes find quicker turnaround by booking detailing directly through that handler—but for reference-standard work requiring two to five days, we coordinate with whichever FBO holds your slot and can provide hangar access when the forecast turns or when night-noise restrictions make apron work impractical.

Winter at Vienna is cold enough that paint becomes cold-soaked, which slows curing of sealants and demands heated-hangar access for any polish work. Summer heat and ultraviolet load are moderate by Mediterranean standards, but the Danube valley funnels biological material—pollen, insect strikes—onto parked aircraft, making decontamination a recurring rather than optional task.

When does Complete Detail make sense?

You book this service once or twice a year, or whenever the aircraft must look exactly right: before a pre-buy inspection, ahead of delivery to a new owner, at the start of a busy charter season or after a sequence of long legs through variable weather. It is the detailing equivalent of a C-check for appearance—everything addressed in one visit so that no surface is merely clean but every surface is correct.

Flight departments with Vienna as a home base often schedule a complete detail in early spring, after months of de-icing fluid, road-salt aerosol and hangar dust, and again in autumn before winter operations begin. Charter operators prefer the service immediately after a lease return or between back-to-back contracts, when cabin disinfection and photographic evidence of condition protect both the aircraft and the commercial relationship.

Because the work takes two to five days, it requires either a maintenance window already in the schedule or enough advance notice that we can coordinate hangar availability and your handler's ground-power and towing support. An AOG complete detail is theoretically possible—if the hangar is free and the cause of the AOG leaves the airframe accessible—but in practice this service rewards planning rather than haste.

How do you organise a multi-day detail at a slot-coordinated airport?

Slot coordination at Vienna applies to your arrival and departure, not to the days the aircraft spends on the ground, so the constraint is hangar availability rather than airport capacity. We ask for at least two weeks' notice: that gives your handler time to confirm a stand or hangar, arrange airside escort for our team, and ensure that GPU and towing are available if we need to move the aircraft between apron and hangar mid-job.

You provide the tech log, any OEM guidance on cabin materials (especially if the interior is new or includes aftermarket veneer), and a list of known issues—paint chips, scratches, stains—that you want documented or, where possible, improved. We provide a work plan with daily milestones, a photographic report at handover, and a debrief with your crew or maintenance contact covering anything that needs further attention—corrosion beneath a belly fairing, a cracked lens, a loose fastener we could not torque without the maintenance manual.

If the aircraft arrives with residual Type I or Type IV fluid, we remove it before any polish work begins; if it departs into forecast icing, we stay clear of control surfaces and static ports during final wipe-down so that your handler's de-icing team has clean access.

What about water and waste disposal at Vienna?

Vienna's environmental rules and the practical limits of apron work mean that a true wash-and-polish usually happens inside a hangar with bunded floor drains, especially in winter. For the exterior wash phase, we use rinseless or waterless methods whenever the apron is the only option; these techniques generate minimal runoff and rely on high-lubricity surfactants and microfibre to lift dirt without scratching.

Waste water from interior extraction and any wash runoff inside the hangar are collected and disposed of through the FBO's systems. Spent compound, used microfibre and packaging leave the airside in our own waste stream, never in the aircraft's or the handler's bins. If your aircraft has just been de-iced and still carries glycol residue, we inform the handler so that the first rinse is treated as glycol-contaminated water rather than ordinary wash waste.

Why not use the FBO's in-house cleaning?

Jet Aviation Vienna lists interior and exterior cleaning among its services, and for a turnaround wash or a quick cabin tidy that is often the fastest path. What we offer is different in scope and outcome: paint decontamination and machine polishing require training, tools and time that a line-service team cannot deploy between arrivals; brightwork restoration means removing oxidation by hand with graduated compounds, not wiping metal with a damp cloth; cabin disinfection follows a protocol with dwell times and material-specific agents, not a spray-and-wipe between legs.

Many flight departments use the FBO's cleaning for routine work and call us when the aircraft needs to be correct—before it goes to market, after a season of charter, or when the chief pilot knows that the principal will notice. We coordinate with whichever handler holds your contract, work to the same airside-safety and FOD-control standards, and leave the aircraft in a state that the tech log and the photographic report can both defend.