Aircraft maintenance is an overhead so the first law of accounting is to reduce overhead, reducing the cost by outsourcing to the cheapest MRO in whatever country they can find is seen as smart business, the second arm of the plan is to reduce the wage levels of the certifying personnel and at the same time make them subservient to the wishes of management such that they will sign out an aircraft based on financial considerations rather than technical standard. Maintenance to a price, not a standard. 

By failing to train and utilise the skilled staff in their own country they very quickly reduce their options to having to send their aircraft out of the country regardless of the standard, a new ploy seen by an international airline with operations in Australia is to change the way line maintenance is carried out and allow clearance to fly to be issued by non licenced staff with a company authorisation and six months experience. They can also defer maintenance on the grounds that there is insufficient time to rectify a defect ! 

They are not the only concern, by their actions many pilots place themselves in danger by failing to write up defects, there are also reports that in certain countries, management have instructed pilots to carry less than the mandatory fuel loads resulting in at least four reports of aircraft landing with insufficient fuel, as well as pilots flying beyond their limits of duty time.

This is all taking place with the active support and/or studiously looking the other way by the very people charged with the statutory responsibility, namely the NAAs. One area that governments seem to collectively  fail to realise that much military maintenance is carried out by the civil industry and reducing the skill level reduces the support base for the military fleet.

Oh, and god help us if the outsourced maintenance facility is in a country that we happen to be at war with! 

Military attitudes have contributed to the problem, pilots are usually officers and maintenance staff are junior to them with the manufactured subservience so hated in the services, maintenance staff are “blackhanders” and “erks” so when the maintenance professional gives an opinion, it can easily be overruled by the officer pilot who flies on the right hand of god.
 

History tells us that licenced maintenance staff were introduced into aviation by some insurance companies, not by Government. Without professional maintenance, aircraft crash and people are killed.

As I pointed out at the EASA/FAA Harmonisation conference in Orlando, companies do not work on aircraft, people do!

The motto of our organisation is “to undertake, supervise and certify for the safety of all who fly”, who else is dedicated to safety above all else? 

John E. Alldis JP.IEng. AMRAeS

General Aviation Councillor

Australian Licenced Aircraft Engineers Association