Serious About Maintenance?

This question has to be asked: does the FAA take maintenance seriously? From all indications, the answer has to be no. There are so many deficiencies in the way the FAA treats the maintenance community that it's hard to know where to start. I'll give it a try, though.

1. Pilots get the attention and the glory. It's ever been so. Pilots hail from the ranks of the officer class in the military and mechanics from the grunts on the ground. Thus, pilots get respect, mechanics get greasy. The evidence? Why does the FAA spend thousands of dollars to publish a slick color magazine oriented to pilots (FAA Aviation News) and not a single dime to publish an FAA safety magazine for mechanics? The FAA used to print, in black and white, the Maintenance Alerts and send it to some 30,000 mechanics. Well, the Alerts still exists, but only online. Honestly, how many of you regularly look at the Alerts on the FAA's website or print it out to share with your colleagues? It comes out fresh every month, at http://av-info.faa.gov/ (click on Aviation Mainten-ance Alerts (AC 43-16A)). So where's our FAA magazine, huh?

2. Pilots get frequent weekend safety seminars. Where are the maintenance seminars? The FAA does offer seminars to the maintenance community, but only for the purposes of Inspection Authorization renewal, and usually in the first quarter, during IA renewal season. That's wacky. So mechanics only need safety information for the purposes of renewing their IA? The FAA does welcome any mechanic to attend these IA seminars, but non-IAs rarely do. Maybe if there were more frequent weekend seminars like there are for pilots, more mechanics would attend.

3. The FAA's new FAASafety.gov website gives short shrift to mechanics. Check this site out http://faasafety.gov/ . It's a great concept: bring some safety material to the attention of the aviation community and make it easy for people to learn about safety seminars (which are all pilot-oriented, see #2). But, too much of this site is focused on pilot issues. The pilot information section offers much more than the mechanic section. It's almost embarrassing. This site could do so much more for mechanics, but the FAA is probably staffed too lean to do much with it now.

4. Shockingly lame dissemination of critical maintenance safety information. I'm getting tired of complaining about this, but no one seems to be listening, so I'll keep on hitting myself in the head with the two-by-four in the hopes that someone from the FAA will notice. Look: the FAA keeps on publishing important information that the maintenance community needs to know about. But this information is buried in the FAA website. And no one from the FAA is telling the maintenance community about this information. No one mentions this information at IA renewal seminars. No one is holding weekend safety seminars for mechanics, which would be an ideal place for FAA inspectors to explain this information to the maintenance community. I think a big part of the reason that FAA inspectors don't tell mechanics about this stuff is that they don't know about it themselves and/or they don't realize how important this information is.

Let me explain again: I'm talking about these things called Special Airworthiness Information Bulletins. SAIBs. Can anyone tell me if any FAA person has ever tried to explain SAIBs at a seminar or during a hangar visit?

Take a look at the SAIB website, which is a good effort by itself: www.faa.gov/certification/aircraft. Note that it says that this is "non-regulatory information," and that means that SAIBS are not mandatory. Click on a recent SAIB, CE-05-02R1 is a good example. This SAIB warns that a batch of Aeroquip 303 hose needs to be removed from service because it is failing in service and has already caused the inflight shutdown of a King Air PT6.

This is important information. It deserves more attention. Whether or not this should be an airworthiness directive is a good question. But if it isn't going to be an AD, then, please, FAA inspectors, tell the maintenance community about this and other SAIBs before it's too late and an accident happens.

Communicate with us more. Give us the opportunity to attend maintenance seminars that aren't just about IA renewal. Make us a nice communications vehicle like the magazine that you do for pilots. Above all, don't treat us like second-class citizens. Mech-anics are an important part of the safety picture and deserve the exact same level of attention and consideration as pilots.