Editor’s Notebook: Who’s Minding the Store?

When you drop your clothes off at the cleaners, each piece is typically marked first, then bundled up in a clearly marked bag of some sort and sent off to a clearing-house laundry facility. Most of the little cleaners in your neighborhood are just storefronts. In other words, they don’t do the washing, cleaning, pressing or folding there. Storefronts outsource the cleaning, starching, folding, dry cleaning, etc. to another larger facility that specializes in this type of business.

To ensure accountability, there must be checks and balances in place in the form of an overseeing agency.

If you go to a good conscientious storefront cleaner, your clothes come back to you clean, fresh and just the way you’d hope. If you had a stain, the storefront would mark it and pass that info on to the larger facility so they could apply a stain remover. If you ask for your shirts to be starched with heavy starch, they pass that information on and your shirts come back starched with the collar and cuffs stiff as cardboard.

That same conscientious storefront cleaner will also check the clothes as they come back to verify its partner has done a good job and to ensure you will be a happy, return customer. For your part, you inspect your clothes to make sure the stains have in fact been removed, that shirts are well-pressed without an annoying wrinkle down the front where it was misaligned on the board.

What does laundry service have to do with aircraft maintenance, you ask? Not a lot, but it serves to point out that many businesses outsource work. You’ve no doubt heard about or already read the Consumer Reports story published recently about outsourcing maintenance. The story made a fairly sensational splash. Let’s review some of their points logically. Some of the points are valid. Others, however, are not.

Of the "warning signs" proposed in the article, the first is that work is being done by non-licensed mechanics as long as one licensed employee signs off the job. It implies that this is the case in foreign countries. But, this is occurring here in the U. S. as well and is an approved practice under the FARs.

Another sign, according to the report, was that airlines that outsource tend to have more delays. Consumer Reports said they did an analysis of flight data to back that claim up but they don’t show the data or say what data they looked at. They may have a point there, but more information would be needed for readers to make an accurate conclusion. Did the data include 20 flights or 2,000 flights; did it include two airlines or 20? The point also doesn’t say that the delays experienced were maintenance-related.

The point that is crucial, in my view, is that the report states "insufficient safeguards are in place to make sure that airlines and others who are supposed to be monitoring the repair work do so adequately." In my view, this is the main point of concern. Whether maintenance work is done in house, in the U.S., or elsewhere, someone needs to be held responsible and accountable. Ultimately, that accountability lies with the airlines. To ensure accountability, there must be checks and balances in place in the form of an overseeing agency. That is the FAA.

Back in our May 2006 issue, Aviation Maintenance interviewed Ken Mead, former inspector general for the Department of Transportation (DOT), who had just retired. He made some salient observations in that interview. Here are a couple of excerpts. "The maintenance system has grown, and the FAA inspector workforce needs attention in that regard as well... Moreover, a substantial part of the maintenance is outsourced, and that has ramifications for the amount of inspectors the FAA needs," Mead said. He added, "It is not an issue of in-house or outsourced maintenance... wherever maintenance is performed, effective oversight is key. We audited many facilities where the FAA inspectors visited only once a year. It’s hard to imagine that the FAA has a good pulse on the state of maintenance in those locations it only visits once a year."