Gulfstream Throws Down the Gauntlet

The operating maintenance philosophy is that good service helps to sell new airplanes.

There are enormous pressures on the aviation maintenance industry. They include the finite supply of trained maintainers, the growing complexity of aircraft, and the need to minimize downtime. How these pressures are being handled, and even surmounted, is the tale told by Larry Flynn, president of Product Support for Gulfstream Aerospace in this exclusive Aviation Maintenance (AM) interview. As the saying goes, every problem provides the stimulus for adaptation.

AM: Thank you for taking the time from your busy schedule to share your insights on maintenance. For purposes of setting the context, exactly how many facilities do you supervise and how many aircraft come in for maintenance on a yearly basis?
Flynn: If I could take one step back from your question and give a little background on what we do and why we do it, that would help, because when I tell you the number of planes we work on in a year, it's a lot. Our philosophy for product support is unique in this industry. Our slogan is "Service helps sell new airplanes." Our entire leadership team uses that slogan, and it's what the focus is. So anything and everything we do in Gulfstream Product Support and at General Dynamics Aviation Services is focused on that slogan.
The first thing that proves we believe that is the fact that we service the majority of our airplanes ourselves. And that is different from most other OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. We estimate that with 1,500 airplanes out there, we service 70% of those airplanes. We have 12 company-owned stores, half of which work only on Gulfstreams, and the other half are these GDAS [General Dynamics Aviation Services] facilities, where the number one priority is to work on Gulfstreams, and the number two priority is to work on other types of airplanes from other OEMs.

AM: The number of airplanes that you cited, those are Gulfstream aircraft?
Flynn: Yes, the fleet of Gulfstreams, we service 70% of them ourselves; the other 30% are done by third party providers, most of which are author-ized Gulfstream service centers outside of the U.S.

AM: Is there some special provision that a third-party supplier has to go though before they're authorized to maintain your aircraft?
Flynn: There are very extensive requirements that are audited once a year.

AM: Audited by the parent company?
Flynn: Yes. They've got to jump over a lot of hurdles to be an authorized service center. We also have a very significant investment in parts; we have these parts spread out over numerous warehouses. Where you might see other OEMs having one, two or three warehouses, we have at least a half dozen, what we call Significant Warehouse Locations around the world. You can't put them all in Savannah, Georgia; they've got to be spread out. Big investment there.
We have a significant differentiator in that we have an airborne product support aircraft. No one else in the industry has it; we have a G100 that sits here in Savannah, is available 365 days a year. All you need to do is call us, tell us that your airplane is AOG, and we will send this airplane, with a technician, with the parts, to you, anywhere in the U.S. or the Caribbean, free of charge to fix your plane.

AM: Do you have measures of merit for this [airborne product support] aircraft, in terms of how many times it was called out in the last 12 months or how many trips did it save for the operator?
Flynn: We've had the airplane in service about three and a half years, and we've flown over 1,000 missions. The product support aircraft is used almost every day. It is a significant differentiator.

AM: And what determines whether or not this airplane, and the technician or technicians on the airplane, are going to be used?
Flynn: The customers call in on an 800 number; that phone is manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and there are a lot of people in our customer call center; any one of them can authorize it on the spot. Nobody calls me. We were the first company, up until recently, to have a president of product support that's on our leadership team. So if you look at our product support and our philosophy of "Service sells planes," it's fully integrated into the leadership team and Gulfstream. It's not rhetoric; it's exactly what we do and think. And these examples I've given shows in spades a significant investment in this end of the business. That results in 6,000+ service visits at those 12 service centers a year, about half of which are Gulfstreams and about half of which are other types of planes. Anything from a pit stop to a significant refurbishment of an airplane.

AM: How do you maintain your workforce? One of the things I'm seeing is a decrease in the number of maintainers coming out of the schoolhouse, enormous pressure on the industry to provide job stability, and people leaving the industry. So how do you retain your workforce?
Flynn: That is our secret to success. No kidding. We are extremely focused on this workforce and feel like we have the best one in the industry. So you say to yourself, how do you do that? You have to start with competitive pay. We assure our workforce that they will be paid competitively; we look at the market all the time, and we will make adjustments in pay as the market changes, and that might be done in the middle of the year.

AM: Now that's for the workforce you already have, and I assume this pay is differentiated by the type of skill and the seniority of the individual.
Flynn: That's correct. Then there are all sorts of retention tools we have. Certainly the most significant is the amount of training we provide. We have earned the FAA Diamond Award for training for the last five years at all 12 sites. That is very significant. We do employee surveys annually, to take a look at what their issues are, and hold our management accountable for fixing any issues. And as far as attracting a new workforce, if you're paying competitively and have a good reputation in the marketplace, and you know they're going to get trained, then some of the tricks of the trade for us are the career fairs that we hold in different cities, and more importantly probably at this point, all of our sites work with local A&P [airframe and powerplant] schools, even to the point, like here in Savannah, we're working with local officials to develop an on-airport local A&P school. Typically we're working with existing A&P schools, but we're getting smarter and helping local officials to start A&P schools.

AM: What about location? I would assume that places like Savannah and Las Vegas are desirable locations for maintainers, but how what about facilities that are located in a different kind of area, where you may have a problem attracting people?
Flynn: We don't have a problem per se, because we stay ahead of it. We're always out recruiting, even if we don't have openings. So we're always recruiting, even during the downturn. We're always out looking for good people. And working with these A&P schools opens up a whole new pipeline. We'll hire people right out of A&P school, and then train them on the airplanes. And we've been very, very successful at all of these sites doing that.

AM: Do you get many people coming out of the military? Or is that pool pretty much dried up at this point?
Flynn: We go to all these military bases, and also hire a significant number of people right out of the military, and we help them work to get their A&P or avionics license. The A&P schools would be the greatest source for us, and the military is right behind.

AM: What about at the A&P schools, are the students coming out fully qualified, or are you finding some training at the A&P school, like dope and fabric, is not relevant to what you need? Is there any deficiency at what you're seeing at the A&P schools, and are you providing feedback to the schools?
Flynn: We are definitely providing feedback. Like this A&P school that's going to start up in Savannah, it's going to be tailored much more around a sophisticated airplane like ours, versus the dope and fabric type plane. So the students will come out in better shape than some of the schools, but there is a minimum requirement to become an A&P technician. Beyond that, we're looking for a good attitude, a good work ethic, and we can certainly quickly train these folks to be very effective on these airplanes.

AM: How do you check this aptitude for the job, by a combination of interviews and tests?
Flynn: Both. Interviews and tests. You have to have the right people doing the interviews, and you've got to ask the right questions.

AM: For example?
Flynn: You look at the competencies that an A&P technician ought to have, to be effective. Most people would probably hone in on the technical skills, but that's just one of the competencies. They've got to exhibit to us the ability to work as a team, the whole human factors side of this, their attitude, their work ethic, communication skills. We basically look at all of our jobs as having, typically, about 5-10 competencies, and then you develop a job description that includes those competencies, and then we have formalized questions for the interview panel. And [the panel] goes down the list of questions that are related to the competencies, rates them on each one, and adds up the score. And the score wins. A very objective way to conduct an interview.
We typically do an interview with a panel, so we've got more than one person doing the hiring.

AM: You mentioned that you look at human factors. The FAA has put a mandate out that repair stations will conduct human factors training.
Flynn: Yes, in April of this year they came out with a whole new training requirement, which obviously we comply with. When I look at human factors, I think of two things. One, and first and foremost, is safety. The second is quality. From a safety standpoint, things are measured very easily; there's a common ground called Total Case Incident Rate, or TCIR. That's an OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] defined term, and it's how many medical situations you had per 200,000 hours work. And we had the lowest TCIR rate of anybody in this industry; in fact, as measured by TCIR, we're as much as four times safer than any other company.

AM: That's interesting, because I looked at workplace injuries. The data are dated about 3-4 years ago, but the aviation industry had a phenomenally high rate of time lost. I talked to an official at Transport Canada, and on the maintenance side, he said you'd be amazed at the number of people falling off or getting injured on platforms and workstations.
Flynn: I'll tell you, if you came down here and looked at what we do safety-wise, I guarantee that you would be amazed. We are safety nuts! We absolutely hone in on it every day, with all of our employees.

AM: How will the FAA mandate be met, and what benefits do you see to meeting this mandate, over and above what you're already doing?
Flynn: We already meet the standard. That's not the issue. We've already met the minimum standard the FAA has put in place. I'm not worried about that; there might be some additional documentation that the FAA wants, but we meet the standard. We don't put people on airplanes unless we, and they, are confident they can do the job.
And we've got extensive documentation on procedures for working on the airplane, through our CMP cards.

AM: CMP?
Flynn: That's our Computerized Maintenance Program. It's actually trade-marked CMP.NET. It's an on-line program; within that, we have task cards for every task on a Gulfstream. The employees are obligated to pull down the task and follow it verbatim. That helps us a lot. We've got job safe analysis cards on all high-risk tasks like towing, hydraulic cards, jacking of the airplane; those procedures are read every time before they do the task. That makes a big difference.
We do safety audits every week.

AM: Who does the audits?
Flynn: The people themselves. We rotate it around, so everybody gets involved. We have a set number of audits that have to be done every week, and we rotate people through it.
And we financially incentivize our workforce to be safe through an annual incentive program.

AM: What is the benefit here for the employee? If he's had an accident-free year, what's in it for him financially?
Flynn: We do it as a team, site-by-site, not person-by-person. Safety and two or three other measurements are included, and [the incentive] can amount to another paycheck. The other big focus is on quality. You can measure that by customer feedback. With all these services I mentioned, I have a mandate to get an 80% return rate on the survey. If you know about surveys, the return rate typically is about 10%-15%. We're at 80%. And I've mandated that we get at least a 4.7 on a 5.0 scale from the customers. We get thousands of these surveys returned, and we're at 4.7 and 80%. [It's a] very, very high standard. We've been doing it for 11 years. We're very focused on it. So that's one way. Certainly if you have rework, that can be measured, there are all sorts of metrics in place to insure quality.

AM: For the new aircraft in particular, there's more going in that's electric and less going in that's hydraulic or pneumatic. How has this trend changed the maintenance from your perspective?
Flynn: A couple of things. When you look at the ratio of the people you're hiring, you're certainly hiring more avionics technicians than maintenance technicians. That's different than 10 or 20 years ago.
And then the focus is totally on the training. We have a unique situation with maintenance training here. We have a partnership with Flight Safety here in Savannah, and also in Dallas. We have co-developed and co-teach maintenance training. So when you go over to Flight Safety, we use their building, but half the instructors are Gulfstream employees and half are Flight Safety. We've been doing that for 7-8 years now.
This training program was developed with Flight Safety, Gulfstream, and our Customer Advisory Board. The Customer Advisory Board played a big part in developing this program. It is extremely popular, it's operating at capacity and we're looking at ways to expand it, not only here but also in Dallas.

AM: I should think with the increasing electrification of aircraft that you have some particular challenges. For example, the No Fault Found challenge, where you have a glitch, it's brought into maintenance, and they can't duplicate the fault. How do you resolve that problem?
Flynn: The airplane helps us, because you plug your laptop into the maintenance data acquisition unit, and the airplane tells you what's at fault. That significantly helps this No Fault Found issue.
In addition, we've had a lot of focus on the vendors, particularly when I started here 11 years ago, to make sure that their laboratories reproduced the operating conditions of the airplane, so that if it's an exposed component, it's got to be in a freezer for a while.
And we call it "shake and bake," or "shake and freeze."
It's got to be duplicating the environment. When you do that, you have a lot less No Fault Founds.

AM: Component failures may mask failures in the wiring system. Have you found a similar problem and how do you address it?
Flynn: We haven't really had wiring issues per se. When I look at No Fault Found, I think about training - did we train the technician correctly - I think about reproducing the environment, and then I think about the troubleshooting in place; is the proper troubleshooting in place? If all of those are in alignment, No Fault Found goes away really quickly.

AM: Have you found that the increasing electrification of your company's airplanes has reduced the maintenance burden?
Flynn: One of the things we're pretty unique with on a new airplane is the configuration of the airplane; 80% of the airplanes we sell are common from an electrical and configuration management standpoint. So we're re-using engineering drawings over and over again in 80% of the planes. The other 20% are custom. We'll build anything you want, but we've focused on a couple things. One, we complete all of our planes. That is unique to some OEMs; 80% are common, so you've got a common wire harness on a component, and that results in a lot easier to troubleshoot a plane, a lot easier to stock parts, less down time, quicker troubleshooting. And from a resale standpoint, it can help you.

AM: Does this commonality include the fitting out of the cabin, when you say you're completing the airplane? Because one of the things I'm finding is that it isn't the basic harnesses in the airplane, but it may be the in-flight entertainment systems, and other whistles and bells, that go into the cabin by third party suppliers, if you will, that cause major maintenance problems from an electrical standpoint.
Flynn: Yeah, that's why a vendor is in 80% of our airplanes. When you're doing it in a common fashion, so that the wiring is common, so that if you have problems with the wiring, it's early on, in a new product, and you fix it. If you're doing all one-off stuff, you've got one-off problems. We learned it the hard way years ago, and we have perfected it, I'll tell you. We just don't have wiring issues.

AM: For aircraft that are no longer in production, what challenges do you face?
Flynn: I hate to keep using the word "unique," but we have a very unique approach for out of production airplanes. The product support for those airplanes is provided by General Dynamics Aviation Services. So if you look at G II, G III, Westwind and Astra aircraft, they are maintained and looked after by GDAS. If you go to GDAS, we have a director of product support for GDAS who's been with the company 30+ years; his total accountability is to make those customers happy. We've developed it through and with the Customer Advisory Board, and have expanded it. We get high marks in the industry, if you look at trade surveys, our own surveys, feedback from our CAB. We have a unique approach there and it seems to be working quite well.
The customers like it because, when you think about it, before we did this, we'd get accused of just paying attention to a new plane. We like the old planes; a lot of our customers for new aircraft sales come from our existing fleet.

AM: Are there other issues that you think our readers would like to know about?
Flynn: I told you that I'd like to come back to this Customer Advisory Board; we're gotten a lot of accolades from these customers. We've got 75 of them on our board, and many of them are on other OEM boards; they will tell you that ours far surpasses other boards.

AM: How is that?
Flynn: We listen. We take action items, and by the time the next meeting comes around, almost every action is closed out.

AM: How often are the meetings?
Flynn: On-site meetings are twice a year, followed up with teleconferences in between. We might take 50 or 100 actions; we rotate the membership every three years. That's the term limit for CAB membership. I personally do an exit interview with the people that are leaving. Why do you think this is effective? And that's what they tell me.

AM: Can you give an example of an issue that was closed out that marked a significant change in how you operated as a result of the Customer Advisory Board?
Flynn: The Triple-T training program. That stands for Total Technical Training. We call it the Triple-T; it's the partnership with Flight Safety that I mentioned. Prior to that, Flight Safety did their own maintenance training, and actually I had training in-house here for customers at Gulfstream. We did it separately, and it was not particularly effective. When we combined forces, when we co-developed the classes, got a lot of feedback from the CAB, that whole thing came out of CAB.
Then, on the airplane side, if you look at the GV, and our current airplanes, the G350 and G450, 500, 550, G150, G200, those all went through the Customer Advisory Board well in advance of the airplanes coming to market.

AM: Before the airplane came to market, what was presented to the Customer Advisory Board that allowed them to offer substantive input on these designs coming down the pike?
Flynn: They all sign a confidentially agreement, and we expose everything. It's part of our culture to get them involved so you build the right product for them and it has the right features. One of the big points of focus is maintainability. A lot of input from them on how to maintain the aircraft, so that you can quickly troubleshoot and quickly fix the plane. The maintenance side of this [process] is a big deal.

AM: Can you give an example of how the design of a new airplane was changed based on the maintenance feedback that came from the Customer Advisory Board?
Flynn: The newest airplane to market is the G150, and we had a significantly enhanced maintenance program called MSG-3. The MSG-3 maintenance program on this airplane is far superior to the one we had on the initial G200s. In the next week or two, we'll get FAA approval to significantly enhance that program, to significantly reduce the down time and the maintenance required on that airplane. We had already bought Galaxy Aerospace after that airplane came to market, and we have taken the last couple years taking that program and enhancing it in parallel with the G150.

AM: What about your field service representatives?
Flynn: We've got a group of about 50 field service representatives around the world that do a great job for us. They work in concert with the field service representatives from our major suppliers, such as Rolls Royce, Honeywell, and we've got a very integrated field service and parts warehouse situation with all of our major vendors - where we may collocate field reps, we may collocate parts in our warehouses - a very integrated vendor relationship from a parts and field service standpoint.
One of our service centers is in London Luton, the largest transient Gulfstream airport in England. Over 1,600 Gulfstreams went through there last year. We opened a factory-owned service center there about three years ago. We doubled the size of it, and it was the first overseas service center to ever receive an FAA Diamond Award for training. That was a big, big deal. And it was our first service center outside of the United States.

Larry Flynn, President of Product Support for Gulfstream Aerospace
Larry Flynn is President, Gulfstream Product Support, President, General Dynamics Aviation Services (GDAS) and a vice president of the General Dynamics Aerospace Group.
He has 20+ years of experience managing aircraft service facilities. Prior to joining Gulfstream in 1995, he was a vice president at Stevens Aviation, where he was responsible for managing six service facilities.
He has a B.A. in business administration and an M.A. in manpower management, both degrees from the University of Kansas.

Gulfstream Seeks Feedback
Gulfstream maintains that they want to do everything possible to make ownership of their aircraft a positive experience. In an effort to accomplish that, the company utilizes many feedback vehicles. Gulfstream
conducts a formal employee satisfaction interview with all 8,000 employees every year. Gulfstream Product Support conducts regular employee roundtables with its own 2,500 employees, as well.
In addition, the company asks each customer to fill out a satisfaction survey after each visit to a service center. Here are some examples of the questions on the survey that customers are asked to rate on a scale from
Totally Satisfied to Totally Dissatisfied:

• Professionalism and expertise of technicians
  
• Warranty claims resolved satisfactorily
  
• Accuracy of quotation as reflected on invoice
  
• Review of service needs/financial terms prior to arrival
  
• Availability of proper tools/equipment for technicians