Safety, Workforce Headline Topics at NBAA Mx Conference

Safety and workforce issues were among the major topics of discussion at NBAA’s Maintenance Conference, held this year in Columbus, Ohio.

In his opening comments, Ed Bolen, the organization’s president and CEO, addressed the recent spate of aviation accidents across the entire industry and its impact on public perception. “They are asking me and everyone in aviation, ‘Is it safe to fly?’” he told the audience. “Now the empirical data suggests yes; the emotional data, maybe not as much.”

As a result, the entire aviation community, including the airlines and general aviation, has come together to back a proposed $12.5 billion allocation to the FAA to be put forward under budget reconciliation, to cover the hiring of more controllers and upgrade air traffic control facilities and equipment, Bolen said.

“We’re no longer going to have people asking if it’s safe to fly because they will know we have enough well-trained people, using the best equipment and keeping the United States what it’s always been: the largest, safest, the most efficient, and the most diverse mix of aircraft anywhere in the world," he said.

Gregory Feith, a former senior accident investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), as well as a private pilot and a highly respected expert on aviation safety, addressed the role that maintenance has to play in his keynote address.

“We don’t want those accidents and the people that are involved in those accidents and incidents to have either perished or at least sustained any kind of injury in vain,” said Feith, who spearheaded numerous high-profile accident investigations during his more than two decades with the agency. “We have to take those lessons, we have to bring them back into aviation.”

Now a consultant, media aviation commentator, and one of the hosts of the Flight Safety Detectives podcast, Feith cited a quote by Wilbur Wright, one of the fathers of powered aviation. “Carelessness and overconfidence are usually more dangerous than deliberately accepted risk.” Indeed, it was his brother, Orville Wright, who was involved in the first fatal aircraft accident in September 1908, where the passenger was killed.

Feith described how the pioneering brothers, searching for a government contract, changed the propellers on their Military Flyer to an untested version before they demonstrated the machine in front of U.S. Army officials. Passenger Thomas Selfridge was mortally wounded in the accident, while Orville—who was piloting the spindly biplane when one of the new propellers broke in flight—was hospitalized for nearly two months.

Feith identified that incident as the birth of aviation risk management. “We do what we need to do to mitigate that risk to as close to zero,” he said, explaining that it can never be eliminated entirely. “As long as you have interaction between humans and machines, there is always going to be that possibility of failure in some way, shape, or form."

One of the key accident factors Feith examined during his tenure with the NTSB was the organizational safety culture of aircraft operators. While he acknowledged that even the best organizations can have accidents, complacency can set in. For example, due to employee turnover, maintenance staff may not have the necessary training, experience, or focus, or there may not be any supervisory oversight of the maintenance work.

Feith cited the fatal crash of a DC-8 freighter in February 2000. The NTSB investigation determined that an inexperienced mechanic attempted a shortcut in control surface maintenance, and the failure to insert a cotter pin resulted in the detachment of the right elevator control tab soon after takeoff. “The nut backed off, the bolt slid out, that control got jammed, and the rest is history,” Feith said, adding that little things can have disastrous consequences. “It’s not tails falling off, it’s not wings coming off: a bolt, a nut, a cotter pin. That’s the difference between success and failure.”

He explained that when it comes to procedures and regulations, there are two forms of noncompliance. Procedural intentional noncompliance is premeditated and can become very pervasive. The person knew the proper procedures and, for some reason, chose not to follow them. Maybe they had done it that way before, and it didn’t have an adverse impact; it may have even earned them praise in the past and made them complacent.

Cases of unintentional noncompliance are where the person got distracted, misunderstood the procedure, or was rushing to complete the task, allowing errors to creep in. In a field as unforgiving as aircraft maintenance, they can be equally devastating.

“It is all about integrity,” said Feith. “You have to take accountability if you’ve done something wrong…because lives depend on it. You can’t shortcut the process.”

Held at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, the show offered an exhibit hall and 28 education sessions featuring more than 50 speakers.

One of those sessions dealt with the question of the retention of skilled mechanics at MROs. According to FAA statistics, last year there were 337,855 airframe and powerplant mechanics in the U.S., of which a little more than 9,000 were newly certified. That is less than the 342,528 listed in 2015, yet the demand has increased by 32%, leading to an intensely competitive market for their services.

“I think that technician retention is a difficult business,” said Chris Poliak, v-p of maintenance with Executive Jet Management (EJM). That is evidenced by online job tracker Zippia, which reports that nearly half of aircraft mechanics quit their job before their second year. At the other end of the spectrum, many current A&Ps are nearing retirement age, and with fewer younger technicians entering the field, that demographic shift could potentially create a “vacuum of expertise” in the industry.

That is leading companies to explore new ways to entice maintenance workers to join them, and also to stay with them. Duncan Aviation has launched an in-house apprenticeship program to grow its pipeline of talent, according to David Sturdy, the MRO’s senior talent acquisition specialist at its Battle Creek, Michigan, facility. “We send technicians through that to learn on corporate jets and get on-the-job training directly on aircraft that are being flown day to day.”

At EJM, Poliak noted there are some areas where it can hire new technicians, but in general, the company’s clients prefer experienced maintenance staff. “We still have stacks of resumes for those positions; it’s very competitive.” He told the audience that word of mouth among his staff in the seasoned mechanic sector helps keep those positions filled.

For Suresh Narayanan, the former COO of JSX and the founder and CEO of Dallas-based Jets MRO, the shortage in maintenance talent is causing some pinch points. “I think the biggest challenge right now on the MRO side is not getting the aircraft out on time with reliability,” he said, noting that the movements of mechanics cause disruptions in shop schedules. His research found that 10 years ago, the average tenure for a worker at a maintenance provider was more than five years. Now that has dipped to one or two years.

While he found that salary is a concern among technicians, it’s not the only criterion. Narayanan noted that equally important were quality-of-life issues.

“The four reasons were culture, engaged leadership, schedule, and benefits,” he said, adding that it is important to continually get feedback from the current team, “because if those reasons change, you don’t want to find out the hard way why people are firing us as employers and jumping around.”

Narayanan also said his company takes a deeper dive into the mindset of a potential new hire to ensure they will mesh well with the existing team members.

With nearly 40% of U.S. maintenance technicians over 60 years old, their ranks are not being replenished. Current calculations say the industry is only attracting 65 new technicians per 100 retirees.

Unless that trend is reversed, it will continue to impact the industry, said Poliak. “They’re still building airplanes, they’re still selling them, owners are still buying them, so we see MROs in a really difficult spot,” he explained. “To grow, they have to expand, they have to build more hangars, bigger hangars to accommodate larger aircraft, and the result is that on-time performance does go down. It becomes a challenge for our industry to maintain a pace that is safe and economical.”

With as many as four generations of workers in the same hangar, Alfredo Garcia, director of sales and business development at ACI Jet’s MRO division, explored what impact those differences and expectations can have in a discussion on bridging the generational gap in aviation maintenance.

As they near retirement, older veteran technicians are expected to not only perform their maintenance tasks efficiently but also serve as mentors for their younger brethren, passing along knowledge to the next generation. This added extra responsibility can lead some to burn out without the prospect of company support, he said.

Garcia advised mentors to share the workload with real tasks, letting younger techs try and fail without shame. “You’re not just teaching tasks, you are shaping thinking,” he told the audience. “That’s how legacy gets built.”

He also said to redefine leadership. “Leadership today isn’t about being the loudest or most senior voice, it’s about making space for others to grow.” A key to doing that, he said, is through the use of mixed-generation teams, recognizing different contributions, and creating psychological safety for questions and curiosity. “A great leader doesn’t fix planes; they grow people.”

Some argue that mentoring requires an investment in time and resources for the employer, as one member of the audience pointed out. “On the business end of that, we have to pay for the mechanic to do the job, we have to pay for that technician that is learning on the job—and we can’t bill that additional cost to the customer, so there’s a lot of times where we are at break even or even losing money by training these guys because it does slow the initial tempo down. We have to sometimes pull back and pick the jobs that we’re able to teach those technicians on.”

Garcia noted that the flow of education is not a single direction. Through reverse mentoring, the younger team members who are generally more tech-savvy in their daily lives can pass those skills along to the veteran technicians, which can provide them with increased relevance in a time where directors of maintenance and even aircraft owners are getting younger.

Yet, Garcia described the relationship between generations as symbiotic: “They need us, we need them.”