AIA Report: Aerospace Employment Reaches 50-Year Low

The Aerospace Industries Association reported on March 4 that U.S. aerospace employment is at the lowest level since 1953.

Citing data released by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the association said that since September 11, 2001, aerospace industry employment has dropped by 106,000 or 13 percent. In 1989, more than 1.3 million people were employed in aerospace, but that number has declined by more than 47.5 percent, or 625,000, according to the AIA’s numbers.

Factors that are causing the dramatic decline in employment, according to AIA president and CEO John Douglass, included:

• The crisis in the civil aviation and commercial space businesses,
• Industry mergers and acquisitions, and
• The September 11 terrorist attacks.

These alarming numbers "should serve as a call to action for a national plan to revitalize the aerospace workforce," Douglass said. "The workforce crisis facing the industry is accelerating, and the trend must be reversed before the future health of the industry is jeopardized."

Industry Braces for More Bad Times

The international aviation industry sees little relief from the economic downturn that has depressed traffic and aircraft sales. Two of the latest examples are Lufthansa and Bombardier Aerospace.

Lufthansa in mid-February froze hiring and said it would park another 10 aircraft used on German and European routes to compensate for "persisting adverse economic situation and the crisis in international air traffic," according to the company, including declines in business travel and average passenger revenues that "have intensified even further at the beginning of the new year."

The company also cited high fuel prices and the prospect of war in Iraq and the drop it would cause in passenger traffic.

The German carrier had already planned to pull nine aircraft from German and European markets. Lufthansa and its affiliates carried slightly more passengers in January than they did a year ago, the company said, but revenues for the month were lower than January 2002's totals.

With the latest announced cutbacks, Lufthansa will take a total of 31 aircraft out of service, and Lufthansa CityLine and regional partners will park 15 others.

"There is an urgent need for action," said Lufthansa’s chairman and CEO, Jürgen Weber. "The end of this trend has possibly not yet been reached."

In early March, Bombardier Aerospace said it planned to lay off 3,000 workers at facilities in Montreal and Toronto in Canada and Belfast, Northern Ireland over the next 12 months.

"We have a responsibility to take aggressive actions to continuously improve our competitive edge and align our production rate with market demand," said Pierre Beaudoin, the company's president and chief operating officer.

The lean times continue to take their toll. Cordiem LLC, the online market place owned by international airliners and aerospace manufacturers, shut down at the end of February after its founders decided to suspend operations indefinitely "as a result of the difficult economic environment in the aviation industry." Formed in 2001, Cordiem was a combination of the MyAircraft.com operation, set up by Honeywell and United Technologies, and the efforts of several airlines to establish an electronic marketplace.

More A&P Schools Closing

The low state of the aviation economy is hitting aviation training schools hard, with several planned A&P school closings announced recently. Most are publicly funded programs, and closings appear to be the result of severe state budget shortfalls.

In Frederick, Maryland, the state’s sole A&P school at Frederick Community College is slated to shut down with the graduating class of 2004. The college’s board of trustees voted in late February to close the A&P program. If this decision holds, the FCC program will not accept new student applications for the 2004 fall semester.

In Connecticut, budget cuts are forcing the state’s two A&P schools to close. Two long-time A&P programs at public schools in California are shutting down as well, one at San Jose State University and the other at the College of San Mateo community college.

As a whole, the A&P mechanic training industry is "still enrolling a good amount of students," said Dick Dumaresq, executive director of the Aviation Technician Education Council. "It’s down from the latest survey [conducted by ATEC], but it’s turning out that more and more students are going into aviation [after graduation]."

Dumaresq said that the industry lost a few schools during the 1990-91 recession, too. "It’s a cyclical kind of a situation," he said. "It mirrors the aviation business. A lot of times, when the economy goes south, the schools stay strong. But here is a perfect storm: the economy is going south, and we’re getting a hit on public higher education, and a downturn in people’s ability to pay. Everybody’s losing jobs, or their money is hit by losing money in the stock market, and colleges don’t have the wherewithal to go back to their endowments because they’re losing money. It’s a triple whammy. I don’t think we’re in a crisis mode right now, but we could be next year."

Dassault Solidifies East Coast Base

The former Atlantic Aviation facility in Wilmington, Delaware has long been known for in-depth maintenance expertise. Under new owner Dassault Falcon, this facility is growing even more capable.

There are more than 1,600 Falcon jets in service, and part of the reason Dassault bought the Wilmington facility in October 2000 was to make sure that comprehensive service was available, especially on the East Coast. Changes in the industry also had an impact, with major Falcon independent service centers changing hands in recent years, risk of more consolidation in the service network, service capacity that didn’t match the fleet distribution, and a looming shortage of technicians. "These and other events," said Jack Young, president of Dassault Falcon-Wilmington, "convinced us that we needed a greater presence in the area of aircraft servicing."

Dassault Falcon isn’t trying to corner the market on Falcon service, but is committed to strengthening the authorized service center (ASC) network and building on its own capability in Wilmington, as well as in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Paris, France. Dean Anderson will head the ASC network. As the new director, service center network, his job includes making sure Falcon operators have access to strong, well-located Falcon service centers. The Wilmington facility will continue to offer service for the former Israel Aircraft Industries jets, such as the Astra and Westwind, which had always been one of the operation’s strong suits.

Dassault Falcon has built a new Structural Repair Center (SRC) in Wilmington. Vincent Antignan is the project manager of the SRC, which will support Falcons worldwide.

The SRC’s main function is repair and overhaul of such parts as wing leading edges, landing gear doors, entry doors, radomes, flaps, wing tips, horizontal stabilizers, and engine after-bodies. Much of the tooling to build new Falcon 20s has been moved to Wilmington from the Falcon factory in France (where Falcon 20 tooling had been located) and Little Rock (the site of tooling for more modern Falcons). Wilmington also has original drawings and mylars used to create new parts from raw metal.

The tooling was moved to speed turn time of complex repairs, according to John Rahilly, who just moved to Wilmington for the job as Dassault Falcon vice president sales and marketing national service center. "The strategic plan," he said, "is to put service products for the Falcon 20 back in the field."

The SRC houses a machine shop with high-speed milling machines and large presses for stamping parts. Next year, a CNC machine will be installed so technicians can manufacture machined ribs.

The center is expected mainly to repair leading edges, which are damaged frequently in ground-service accidents. Plenty of the 470 Falcon 20s built are still flying and the crew at the SRC is so confident that many will need such repairs that they ordered a two-year backlog of leading edge skins from the factory.

A Falcon leading edge consists of two layers. The outer layer is made at the factory, but SRC technicians can make the inner layer on a special stretching tool. After checking the leading edge assembly spar for straightness, technicians clean all corrosion and repaint the spar and ribs, build up new inner and outer skins, then drill the skins and rivet the assembly together. This is a complicated process, dependent on highly skilled technicians. The SRC employs 21 people, but Dassault Falcon expects to grow that number to 40 this year.

The Wilmington facility also does comprehensive composite repairs and is authorized as a Honeywell TFE731 major service center status and CFE738 and APU line service center authorization. As an FAA designated alteration station, its engineers can issue supplemental type certificates for modifications. Those engineers include FAA designated engineering representatives for airframe structures, electrical and mechanical systems and equipment, and flight test. Full interior modification capability is available, as well as paint, avionics repair and installation, and Level III NDT.

The company was to begin construction this month of a 40,000-square foot paint hangar. Scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2004, it will be able to handle up to 70 aircraft per year in a two-bay configuration. The old paint hangar will be converted to maintenance space, adding 20,000 square feet to the Wilmington maintenance facilities.

Perplexed by Baffle Repairs?

If you do any work on piston engines, you’ve run across baffles in such bad condition that they had to be repaired or replaced. That is easier said than done. Bought new, a Cessna 182 side tray can run $1,000. Most of the used baffles you find are in as bad, or worse, shape than the set you have. So who are you going to call? Baffle Boy, a.k.a. Brooks Margolien, president of Aero Care

Aero Care is one of the few companies that repairs and refurbishes engine baffles, which are more than they may seem. "Baffles are more than just the metal with rubber sealing strips," Margolien said. "They are complicated sheet metal assemblies that effectively force air around the cylinders’ cooling fins."

That complex assembly is just what makes repairing baffles so tough and time consuming for the average repair shop. One piece of metal may have to be bent four times or more, which can cause cracking that makes the part scrap if it’s not done right. "Most A&Ps today don’t have the experience necessary to properly bend the metal and keep it from cracking under the load," he added.

Margolien started Baffle Boy after his maintenance shop began getting requests from other shops to work on their customers' baffles.

"I had all the equipment and was doing it for my customers," he said. "So it was easy to expand to offer it to others. Besides, it’s really getting harder to find shops to do this kind of work."

Margolien said even new, high-priced baffles seldom come primed. If a shop has to spend time masking off the rubber seals, that adds to the cost. Baffle Boy parts arrive painted and ready to install.

"The nice thing about our painted baffles is you can still see them when they’re installed in the airplane," Margolien added. "You can spend $5,000 on an engine overhaul and nobody notices. But spend a few extra bucks on reconditioned baffles and everybody can see them. Pilots like that."

He said Baffle Boy parts are all test fitted to the actual type of cylinder found on the customer's engine. Aero Care has samples of many cylinders on site for this.

Margolien said he will provide maintenance shops with a written quote. "It’s important for independent FBOs to have the quote so they don’t get hit with run-away labor costs," he said. "I will also compare prices and availability of the new stuff before we unload a bunch of man-hours on a baffle. There are some times when the pieces are so badly beat-up that it’s cheaper to buy a new set."–Dale Smith

For more information:
Aero Care/Baffle Boy
Phone 978-897-4010
Email: AeroKare@aol.com

Dallas Airmotive Adopts Avexus

After a year-long evaluation, Dallas Airmotive chose Impresa software by Avexus to automate its 16 turbine engine maintenance, repair, and overhaul facilities.

"We formed a team a year ago," said Bill Barber, Dallas Airmotive spokesman. The team, led by Dallas Airmotive vice president of MIS Randy Ingram, visited a number of software providers and their customers, to see the software in action. Three companies were invited to submit detailed proposals. Dallas Airmotive winnowed that down to two finalists, then spent more time with those companies’ customers before finally choosing Impresa. Part of the evaluation process included running simulations using actual Dallas Airmotive data.

It should take a year to implement Impresa, and this will be done simultaneously at Dallas Airmotive’s 16 facilities with 850 users. Major functions of the software will be to facilitate scheduling, planning, and management of MRO tasks. Impresa’s customer management module will also be used by the Dallas Airmotive sales force to access customer information anywhere in the world 24 hours a day. An integrated online billing module should help Dallas Airmotive obtain approvals faster, "which will speed billing and improve cash flow," according to a company statement.

According to Avexus, other companies that competed for the Dallas Airmotive software contract included Cincom, Component Control, Continuum Applied Technology, Industrial and Financial Systems, and Intentia.