As a leading designer and manufacturer of airline maintenance stands and docking systems, Uni-Systems was one of several companies to respond to a request for proposal from American Airlines to develop a sophisticated maintenance docking system for its Boeing 777 and 767 class aircraft. To keep commercial passenger jets functioning safely, commercial airline companies perform regular maintenance and annual overhauls of every plane in their fleet. While regular maintenance is often performed in a hangar or on the tarmac, yearly overhauls require sophisticated equipment to provide maintenance workers with safe, ready access to every part of the plane, from the nose, fuselage, and tail to the landing gear, stabilizers, and wing tips. Although Uni-Systems had developed numerous maintenance stands and docking systems for several domestic and international air carriers in the past, American Airlines, the world’s largest commercial airline, was a new customer and the Boeing 777s were an entirely new class of aircraft. Prompted by a desire to win American’s business and break new ground on a new class of planes, Uni-Systems developed an innovative new maintenance docking system design called the Uni-Dock™ and secured the contract, according to Mike Becker, lead mechanical engineer on the Uni-Dock project.