AIN Survey: Independent Maintenance Shops Surviving and Thriving

The manufacturers of business jets hold a lot of cards when it comes to maintenance of their products. Most of them prefer to be the maintenance provider for their aircraft that are relatively young, especially those still covered under warranty, but often even longer than that. But obviously factory-owned service centers can’t handle all of the business generated by their fleets. Even Textron Aviation’s large company-owned service center network would find it impossible to maintain every one of the 7,000 Citations that it has delivered and that are still flying.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to keep the customer flying, and OEMs and independent maintenance shops spend enormous amounts of time and effort building expensive facilities, buying tools and training technicians. Yet a tug-of-war endures between OEMs and independent service centers. The common complaint is that OEMs keep as much work as possible for themselves, and the pace of this practice picks up when sales of new aircraft drop, in an effort to restore lost revenue. Most OEMs promote the concept of affiliated service centers that are authorized to work on their customers’ aircraft, and those without affiliation complain that they receive zero discounts on parts, which raises costs for their customers.

The business aviation maintenance segment is complicated, and the permutations of the relationship between OEMs and independent service centers are constantly changing. For this special report, AIN sent a series of questions to independent service centers, both factory-affiliated and non-affiliated types, to gauge the current sentiment among these companies.