Editor’s Notebook

Where Has All the Talent Gone?

A painful transition is occurring in the aviation maintenance industry, a shift in the market's need for maintenance technicians with certain skills to a new type of technician who is more comfortable with troubleshooting critical paths and computer databases than shooting rivets and opening inspection panels. The transition is painful because jobs that were finally reaching the point of paying a decent salary have disappeared, sent overseas to lower-cost maintenance providers or to non-airline maintenance companies that aren't required to employ as many mechanics with A&P certificates as is an operator that conducts its own maintenance.

Transitions, especially painful ones like this, happen whether the participants like it or not. Since the 2001 recession, thousands of good maintenance jobs at airlines have disappeared. United Airlines moved all of its heavy maintenance to non-airline-owned providers; UAL's Boeing 777 heavy maintenance, for example, is now done at Ameco Beijing in China. The airline's narrowbody maintenance is done, by odd coincidence, in Indianapolis, Indiana, at a beautifully designed former UAL facility now partially leased by AAR.

Northwest Airlines, still involved as this is being written in a bitter battle with its mechanics union--the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association--is sending all heavy maintenance elsewhere and is even outsourcing line maintenance at all other locations it flies to except for Minneapolis, Minnesota and Detroit, Michigan. Delta Air Lines is also moving away from heavy maintenance, having shifted much of that to Avborne and Air Canada Technical Services.

None of this is really that new, nor should it have come as a surprise to the people who run the unions for the mechanics at the airlines. Southwest Airlines has been outsourcing a lot of maintenance for many years yet remains a profitable airline that is a desirable place to work. JetBlue never planned to do its own heavy maintenance when it launched, yet the company employs many line mechanics. After a rocky start with outsourcing in its ValuJet division, AirTran today is a successful outsourcer with an excellent safety record, and it employs a number of mechanics. European airlines have an even longer history of successful outsourcing.

The point here is not to raise the debate about maintenance outsourcing safety and effectiveness but to note the trend. Modern airlines need maintenance professionals, just not the kind that many people think of when they think of aircraft mechanics. The kind of mechanics or technicians that modern airlines need are highly trained, system-knowledge-savvy, and fully engaged in the concept of electronics tying together all aspects of aeronautical technology. A modern mechanic is comfortable with using a fault database to isolate and help eliminate a recurring error. He or she knows how to use sophisticated test equipment to validate system safety or troubleshoot problems and is comfortable using a computer almost as much as or more than opening drawers in a big red toolbox. And this mechanic understands that nothing stays the same and that this industry is changing and that perhaps he or she is better off with a career as an aviation maintenance mechanic/technician/expert analyst rather than a mechanic whose job for the past 20 years has been the same stultifying tedious task in the same back shop working on the same equipment.

Those who want to remain in this industry will have to adapt. The unions will eventually have to adapt, too. The schools that train new mechanics will have to add training in modern technologies, no matter whether the FAA modifies the applicable rules or not. And the airlines, to ensure that there remains a supply of personnel to fill technical jobs, will not only have to work closely with the A&P schools and the FAA to ensure that modern mechanics are properly trained but also help the industry understand what the airlines need in terms of future technical workers. If the airlines aren't careful to consider these issues, then they shouldn't be surprised one day to find that there aren't any workers in the pipeline anymore and that they have all left for greener pastures.