Airline Maintenance Issue Predicted by Book Part 2 – Deadly Skies?
With the announcement of thousands of flights and over 250 Thousand passengers ‘stranded’ due to the American Airlines MD-80 wiring harness issue I had to go back and review the accuracy of my premise in ‘Physical Asset Management for the Executive – Caution: Don’t Read This If You Are On An Airplane.’ In the book I predicted that American was the best actor because of their strong union preventing outsourcing of safety related inspections and their reporting and oversight by the FAA. Was I wrong?
Over the past two days (I had advanced warning about American) I went back to review my premises. Could it be that the outsourced maintenance was actually performing better?
Between the work on the book, my recent editorials and blogs, the reason why American Airlines came under so much scrutiny became very obvious. And it is scarier than I ever predicted in the past.
Specifically because American Airlines performs almost all of its critical maintenance by FAA certified internal facilities and professionals they were put in the position of being under scrutiny. Non-certified and outsourced facilities are not under the same reporting requirements as a certified internal facility, in most cases there are no reporting requirements AT ALL (Reference Chapter 4.7 of ‘Physical Asset Management for the Executive’). With my recent editorials and postings related to the Southwest Airlines issue (which occurred several days after the publishing of the book) I had found a transcript of a 2003 interview where the head of FAA had stated that they relied upon this data to determine risk.
In effect, the ability of the FAA to determine that the risk of the only airline where they have the greatest amount of data was severe enough to ground thousands of flights and 100’s of thousands of passengers, generate significant overtime and cause distruption to AA’s schedule for weeks to come is a direct result of FAA’s lack of oversight and poor management of the maintenance program within FAA. With a strong mechanics union and direct FAA oversight as compared to all of the other airlines where a majority of critical maintenance and inspections are being performed by non-certified and non-oversight repair facilities by mechanics making $10-15/hour over FAA certified $60+/hour mechanics outsourced both in and out of country: what can be assumed concerning the condition of those aircraft?
For instance, one of the worst actors concerning maintenance activities and reported cover-ups by both the airline and FAA management (Reference Department of Transportation reports and ‘Physical Asset Management’) is Northwest Airlines. However, after breaking the NWA mechanics union they outsourced a significant amount of maintenance and when an FAA inspector attempted to identify significant maintenance safety inspection his supervisors, under pressure by the airline, transferred him until the US Department of Transportation Inspector General reviewed the case and put him back in his position. After my direct experiences with NWA maintenance, in particular the unattached rear cone in February of 2007, I have been expecting Northwest to come under a huge amount of scrutiny. Yet, only the airlines that have reporting information in with FAA have been under scrutiny.
With the FAA using only this reporting information, per their interviews, to determine risk, what is the condition of the aircraft that have been outsourced without any reporting requirement. Worse, what is the lesson that the airlines that have just been punished for performing at least some level of work that is overseen? Can we expect to see American Airlines and the others release more of their maintenance to low cost certified and uncertified facilities?
This is all the direct result of the wrong idea and definition of ‘customer’ and also relates to how our organizations have also been performing and viewing maintenance. I will be covering this in more detail soon, unless there is a need to report additional information in the meantime.
Byline:
Howard W Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP
SUCCESS by DESIGN Reliability Services
National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981) and International Federation of Journalists
Labels: Airline Maintenance Issue Predicted by Book Part 2 – Deadly Skies?
