Regulating Maintenance

I have been in this business for over 40 years. I have found a very simple solution to regulating all maintenance, since the FAA won't. Mandatory insurance! If you cannot license your car each year without insurance, then the same should apply to aircraft.

Any watercraft in the state of California with a motor has to have a California state number, renewed every year. And very soon, nationwide, you will have to have a boating license to operate a watercraft. If you have to license your aircraft with the state every year, and insurance is a mandatory requirement, bingo, guess what?

With mandatory aircraft insurance the owner would have to file the yearly license inspection with that insurance company. The insurance company then would check the FAA database to make sure the I.A. certificate is current and correct to the individual. The insurance companies hopefully will go a step farther with any and all maintenance being reported and on file with them, and make sure the A&P or I.A. have current qualifications to do the maintenance on that type aircraft. This is not a difficult task at all for the insurance companies to do.

This idea here is extremely brief, but does have merit for the ability to regulate and incorporate aviation safety where the FAA won't.

Dale Buckeridge
A&P I.A.

Wiring Maintenance

Mr. Collins and Ms. Edwards hit the problem on the head (see AM, August, p. 30, "Wiring Matters"). The statement: "Again, these 'NO FAULT FOUND (NFF)' incidents that are caused by wiring is another reason that the metrics are believed to be underreported." As a Naval aviation maintenance analyst for 20+ years, this statement is more true than the Navy desires to admit.

I have urged the [Navy] to make training their number one issue when the wiring support equipment (SE) is introduced into the fleet. If this is not done, the problem of aircraft wiring shall become more difficult. The article did not mention that if the support equipment and training are provided, that at least a 25 percent decrease in direct maintenance man hours (DMMH) will result. In my opinion it will be over 40 percent.

Let's discuss return on investment (ROI). Suppose the aircraft I support buys the Wiring SE for 16 squadrons, and each SE item cost $100,000. That is $1.6 million in acquisition costs. For calendar year 2005 the Navy spent $4.02 million in DMMH costs for my aircraft. Now if I reduce that by 1/4 (25 percent) after acquisition of the wiring SE for the following year, I have saved $1.005 milllion, which is $595,000 less than the wiring SE acquisition. In other words, I have recovered 66 percent of the SE cost in just one year of use. If I assume the same savings the following year, I have fully recovered my SE acquisition cost by the month of May. This means that in approximately 1.5 years I have fully recovered my cost, and now my ROI really goes in the positive direction.

Naval avionics technician
Name withheld by request