Ross MacArthur: The Customer-Service Connection

If anyone wonders if there's not a direct relationship between customer service and aviation maintenance, they need to meet Ross MacArthur.

MacArthur is a systems engineer in the Dallas,Texas-based Maintenance and Engineering Department for Southwest Airlines. He is the sole engineer at Southwest Airlines responsible for fire protection and flight controls for the company's Boeing 737 fleet, which includes 388 jets.

MacArthur is driven by a philosophy of "team before self." He lives by a personal credo: all that he does must relate to the highest standard of aviation safety. As such, he's programmed his own thinking to follow a logical framework that employs his professional philosophy. For every decision point in his job, he recommends the following two questions:

Will the decision I am about to make result in a safer aircraft? If the answer is yes, then do it. If the answer is no, then go to the following question.

Will the decision I am about to make result in a more affordable aircraft for our customers? If the answer is yes with no compromise in safety, then do it. If the answer is no, then immediately drop the entire matter and go find another more pressing issue to work.

"In other words," he said, "don't spend even one moment wasting time on an issue that does not make the aircraft either safer or cheaper to operate."

His top achievements include the evaluation and installation of Southwest's cargo fire detection and suppression system aboard its aircraft. As a new hire for Southwest in 2000, MacArthur walked into the program management and implementation of such a system and he successfully carried this out in slightly more than one year.

"It required a strong dose of program management to get the remaining, approximate 200-plus aircraft completed by the deadline," he explained. "One lasting impression left with me was that Southwest Airlines maintenance and engineering management would entrust full responsibility to essentially a new-hire. But this speaks tremendously well of the empowerment within the organization, which is essential for an organization to operate efficiently."

His aviation accomplishments have early roots. Much of MacArthur's upbringing was cultured with aviation influence. His home displayed a photo of a Boeing aircraft his father flew in 1937. He grew up reading excerpts from his grandfather's diary, detailing his first flight in an airplane in 1927. The diary included scraps of paper from the pilot of the aircraft with notations such as "Utah Lake to the right (fresh water)," and "Those are wild horses."

In 1969, during the certification of the 747, Boeing had the prototype in Roswell for flight testing. The company ran an advertisement in the local newspapers for volunteers to participate in the FAA-mandated cabin evacuation test. MacArthur's entire family of five (including his mom) joined hundreds of other neighbors, climbed aboard the big new jet, and eventually jumped down the escape slides twice.

MacArthur went on to receive a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1983 and was offered a job right out of school with Boeing Military Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas. "I still laugh when I think about the fact that this job offer letter stated I was to be hired to work in the area of 'B-52 wing, body, and empennage design" he recalled. " I had to immediately go to a dictionary to see what 'empennage' meant."

MacArthur's background and education provided a natural career path into the aviation community. His accomplishments at Southwest Airlines prompted Jim Sokol, the airline's vice president of maintenance and engineering, to describe him as someone who "provides outstanding customer service to all his customers."

So what does MacArthur believe to be the challenge in the aviation maintenance community today?

"Communication" he said. "I firmly believe that the free exchange of information is at the heart of every successful organization." The inverse is true also. "Companies at best are terribly inefficient and at worst fail when communication does not exist and when information is not shared," he explained. "There is never a right time for withholding information and for empire building."

MacArthur views his daily goal as delivering understandable and correct answers into the hands of the mechanics of Southwest Airlines. "If my phone rings in the middle of the night from maintenance control or a maintenance base, at the most basic level, it means I failed to push out the information a mechanic needed to properly perform his job," he said. "It is because I did not do my job right in the first place. The next day I will begin analyzing what the mechanic needed, and how I am going to get the information into his hands for the next time."