I read the letter from Chuck Olson in the March issue of Aviation Maintenance (page 8). You made some good points, until your last paragraph.

First, you are very blessed to have had your job for 14 years! (I bet that's the only place you have worked.) But what makes you think that you're more qualified then those third-party mechanics?

Some, if not most of us, worked at a major carrier just like you at one time. The problem is poor management, as you suggested. However to paint a picture that somehow we are not worthy anymore is just wrong!

By the way I have worked on Northwest Airlines aircraft at a third-party provider. Your company must think I and many others are qualified.

I'm offended being told I'm a shade-tree mechanic and have a rag and monkey wrenches hanging from my back pocket.

Looking at the Fundamental Focus

The statistics from the NTSB are not the only ones you may want to look at. NTSB board member John Goglia once said the real figures lie with the insurance underwriters who actually have to pay for the cost of maintenance errors. Before you glimpse at those figures I would advise you to sit down.

The real solution has been around for many years and it is called human factors. All of the points you mention in your article (March, page 3) are completely covered in human factors programs. The problem lies in the industry buy-in to human factors. Interestingly enough we recently offered a human factors program development course, STAMINA, to more than 1,000 repair stations located along the Eastern seaboard. We received one response for the course. This lack of interest indicates to us a complete misunderstanding of what human factors are and what they can do for the maintenance organization and technicians.

Let's talk for a moment about professionalism in the maintenance industry, or more importantly what is perceived as being competent. Without a complete understanding of human factors issues a maintenance organization and workforce can only hope to be competent to a level that will never reach the level of professional competence. If, on the other hand, a maintenance organization develops a human factors program and the workforce is properly trained they may not only see a significant increase in maintenance safety, but potential productivity increases of over 20 percent are possible and they will understand the true meaning of competence. This should be an important factor for maintenance organizations that never see double-digit percentages on their bottom line.

Human factors is about changing the organizational culture, effecting change that increases safety, efficiency, motivation, and competence. This is when you become a true maintenance professional.

On Target

Your editorial was pretty much right on target. As a former mechanic (avionics, Air Force) I think the biggest problem is indeed the management chain where everything else seems to take precedence over safety or quality. I once nearly got fired, actually several times, for complaining about safety and quality issues. In particular, I came to work and found the weekend crew had produced 20 LN-12 navigational computers. Knowing of all the problems, mostly intermittencies in these boxes, I put all 20 back on the final tester and kicked 18 back for rework, after finding that all were failing in the first five minutes of testing. Production is all that counted, however, and it didn't matter one iota that I had caught these problems before they went out the door and endangered the aircraft and pilot.

With management attitudes such as this, the lower-grade mechanics soon learn that nothing matters that pertains to their work and quality. The visual inspection process that you stressed as being important was virtually ignored by these soldering and repair mechanics in our depot because management would never place any real importance on it. Because of all the complaining that I would do about the poor workmanship, rather than place the responsibility on the persons doing the work, I was assigned to 100-percent inspect every item that came to the final test stations. In one, two-week period, I personally "pink slipped" more than 200 items for major visual violations such as wires not soldered, screws missing, frayed insulation, broken wire strands, etc. However, shop management reported to higher levels that only three items had failed visual inspection during the period, and I later got a personal, in-front-of-the-troops reprimand for generating such a huge and damaging paper trail pertaining to their management malfeasance.

One big problem with management that you might focus on is the way they calculate payback ratios on diagnostic and other equipment that the technicians need. For example, our tester, the IFD-2000, is nearly impossible to sell to anyone because it costs money, it takes extra technician time to set up and test, and when it finds anomalies, extra work is again involved in fixing the problem.

The repair shop or depot is likely on a fixed-price basis, so it's always easier for the technician to just write-off any intermittent anomalies as another NFF (no fault found). Management and the technicians both like this NFF loophole because it means things just generally never get fixed and they can milk the situation perhaps dozens of times before a problem actually becomes bad enough to fix easily. Let's call it the job security factor. So, to keep any improvements from choking the golden goose of NFF, they do the cost-benefit calculations in such a way that there will never be a return on investment at the shop level, which is pretty much guaranteed as long as the much larger benefits to the owner or to the corporation and stockholders, are never figured in.

Regarding the Charlotte Observer article where it claimed 42 percent of accidents were maintenance-related. It might be considerably higher when you consider all the accidents that were related to electrical or avionic information or control failures. Perhaps these systems were simply not tested correctly, which technically leads back to a technician or mechanic somewhere in the loop. It's very disturbing from our position when numerous line or depot mechanics tell us about astronomical NFF rates of 90 percent and higher. I don't mean to suggest for a second that any mechanic or technician is responsible when management won't provide the tools necessary to do the job right. The reason that I think the 42-percent figure might be higher is when we look at the official NTSB reports, we see the signs of testing or NFF written all over the accident, yet the NTSB cites equipment failures rather than the real cause...testing and repair procedures used to maintain that equipment.

In our submission to the NTSB public docket concerning Flight 587, we recommended that the numerous repeat failures on the rudder-control computer were definite signs of a continuing NFF problem, exacerbated by digital averaging in the measurement equipment used to test the system.