Oversight of Maintenance & Repair Facility Practices Under Examination

Air Safety Week, Sept 6, 1999

CHICAGO - The potential for maintenance mishaps to cause crashes is the new frontier of aviation safety. Economic pressures have stimulated many US airlines to contract out more of the maintenance traditionally performed "in-house," and the repair stations are relying ever more on contract labor.

Couple these two trends to the erosion of experience in the pool of technicians, and the resulting "triple whammy" presents a new challenge to the safety of the industry.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), concerned about the trend, has convened a one-year review of the practices associated with aviation maintenance work performed at contract repair facilities. Sometimes called third-party repair facilities, they are certified under Part 145 of the Federal Aviation Regulations.

A hearing here last week marked the public kickoff of the Safety Board's review. Its timing appears to have been tied to the recent indictments of three SabreTech employees (see ASW, Jul. 19).

"The NTSB is the national safety board, not the national accident investigation board," exclaimed NTSB Vice Chairman Robert Francis, who directed the August 30 forum. "This conference is a way to be pro-active and to pre-empt accidents," he declared.

For months, Board member John Goglia has been briefing industry executives about the significant number of maintenance mishaps that have led to embarrassing incidents such as an engine falling off a 747 during takeoff, and missing screws on a horizontal stabilizer led to the fatal crash of a regional aircraft.

Now, the Safety Board is taking Goglia's road show to a more formal level of concern. "Something's changing pretty dramatically in the industry," Francis told Air Safety Week. That change is a 30 percent increase between 1990-1996 in the amount of aviation maintenance work performed by contract repair stations. According to Francis, this development translates into a single, big-picture statistic: "Now 50 percent of the work is done by organizations outside the carriers."

There is another, more arresting statistic. Instances of "inadequate quality" in the Service Difficulty Report (SDR) data base have skyrocketed nearly 500 percent during the same period that Francis observed that the amount of out-sourced work increased by a third.

Of 85 major aircraft accidents the board investigated in the period 1985-1996, poor maintenance was a factor in one out of five cases. Francis and his fellow Board members clearly do not want to see that percentage increase. At its sunshine hearing on the crash of ValuJet Flight 592, Board members expressed strong concern about the amount of out-sourcing at the carrier and about holes in oversight (see ASW, Aug. 25, 1997).

At last week's hearing, attended by many of the key "players" in the industry, the discussions focused on the risk-benefit of contracting out, oversight of the work performed, and the skill level of the workforce. Highlights of these three areas follow:

* The decision to out-source. Some carriers believe that maintenance work, particularly the capital-intensive heavy maintenance, is best put in the hands of the experts. Tony Quillen, director of heavy maintenance for Southwest Airlines [LUV] described contracting out as a natural division of labor. For Part 145 repair stations, maintenance is their core business and expertise. "Our core business is carrying passengers."

Southwest presently contracts out about half of its heavy "D" check work. The carrier also performs minimal component repair inhouse, parceling out some 90 percent of that work, Quillen explained. He said repair stations also are more flexible, in terms of their ability to start and close lines based on the workload.

His sentiments were echoed by Frank Basile, senior manager for aircraft conversions at Federal Express [FDX]. "Our core business is moving packages," he said. The company, he added, out-sources some 80 percent of its maintenance work. "We build our relationship with a Part 145 facility to provide the services that we use," he explained. Basile said this approach has been the FedEx business and operating philosophy from the outset, and that it now fits the times.

"Airplanes are more complicated today," he said, citing their more advanced avionics, the special plating and processing techniques needed for metal parts, and so forth.

An alternate view was presented by Yvonne Daverin, quality assurance director for United Airlines [UAL]. The carrier performs almost all of its own maintenance work, up to and including "D" checks. Less than 20 percent of United's work is contracted out. The in-house capability, she said, provides for a stable workforce and a greater inherent flexibility to respond to demands such as airworthiness directives (ADs). "Over the years, we have developed our own core competencies," she said.

Jay Hiles, senior air safety investigator for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and a 21-year Certified Aircraft Technician for USAirways [U], took a more acerbic view of contracting-out. It's a cost-saving measure, pure and simple, he declared. "The majority of the workforce for the carriers consists of certified airframe and powerplant (A&P) mechanics. Non-certificated mechanics who comprise a significant fraction of the workforce at Part 145 repair stations are not paid the same," he said. Indeed, Hiles argued that the net cost to the carrier of outsourcing could be greater. Some carriers, he said, are finding more discrepancies that have to be rectified when an airplane comes back from a "D" check.