IN 2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit – Maintenance, Moderated by Matt Thurber, Editor-in-Chief, AIN Media Group
AIN’s Winter 2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit (CALS) brought together business aviation thought leaders to examine and discuss some of our industry’s pressing issues. This session’s topics included maintenance, training, hiring/DEI, legal concerns, employee retention, generational differences, compensation, and sustainability.
To keep up with increasing business aircraft flight hours, today’s DOMs face many more issues than the maintenance and inspection of their aircraft.
The CALS attendees identified four critical areas that maintenance department leaders are dealing with now: workforce retention, supply-chain management, parts pricing, and balancing scheduling at already overcrowded MROs.
The Cost of Workforce Retention
While a lot has changed in business aviation over the past couple of years, one critical element hasn’t: operators are still struggling to recruit and retain technicians, and the solution often comes down to money.
“During our exit interviews, it’s always about salary,” a DOM says. “Right now, we’re reevaluating salaries with our maintenance team because it cannot continue as is.”
“In our area, there’s a lot of competition from the OEM-owned facilities offering large signing bonuses,” a corporate director of aviation adds. “We have to look at ways to stay competitive.”
While cash remains king, the quality of work and life are becoming more important to many multigenerational technicians.
“We recently changed our shifts to three 12s that you alternate every other week,” an MRO representative explains. “Providing more time off creates a better quality-of-life schedule, which seems great for families.”
One DOM cautioned that companies need to understand the impact of flex scheduling regarding local overtime laws. “If technicians agree to an alternative schedule, the overtime doesn’t kick in until after the 11th or 12th hour,” he says. “But in California, it goes directly to double-time after the 12th hour.”
Another trend is to have the technicians earn their FAA A&P licenses. “I’ve told some of the contractors that if they want me to bring them on direct, they need to finish their license,” a manager at an MRO explains. “It’s been an added incentive for them.”
Managing Supply-chain Issues
Now that your technicians are ready to do the work, the next big challenge today is finding the replacement parts you need. “Next-day availability” isn’t as common as it used to be.
“We’re told the ‘carbon shortage’ has led to increased lead times for things like windshields and shortages like we’re seeing for tires,” a flight department manager says. “I’ve also heard it blamed on a workforce shortage. Either way, it takes longer to get replacement parts today.”
That’s putting added strain on maintenance providers to ensure they have the parts their customers need. So, they have to be more proactive in finding the necessary components. The danger is that parts scarcity opens the door to unscrupulous business practices.
“Traceability is a big concern, especially with rotable parts,” a flight department DOM cautioned. “You just have to know where they are coming from. If it’s a mom-and-pop shop out of South Florida, I’m probably not going to accept it. That means the airplane may be on the ground longer, but it’s not worth the risk.”
“Controlling maintenance costs and scheduling is everything to us,” an MRO’s DOM says. “That’s why we’re preordering parts we know you need. I might have 20 turbine rotors on order for a specific APU so that I have them this year.”
Wrestling with Rising Parts Prices
Unfortunately, for anyone charged with controlling the cost of aircraft maintenance, prices are going up while parts availabilities are down. The two problems are seemingly inseparable.
“In general, across the OEMs, we’re seeing anywhere from 10 to 20 percent price increases, where it used to be around 6 percent a year,” a corporate DOM says. “They say there are a lot of reasons like materials shortages and cost increases.”
Price increases for new parts have become so high that operators are parting out lower-time aircraft to meet their need for affordable and available parts.
“We did close to 20 part-outs last year on much younger aircraft than in the past,” the manager of a parts provider explains. “We need to support the newer models. That’s just the nature of our business today.”
True. Today’s trend is toward scavenging perfectly good airplanes purely for the immediate availability and high resale value of their critical parts. Of course, parts taken from damaged aircraft also draw big bucks on the MRO market, but you have to be careful.
“We need the entire history of that aircraft and the incident,” an MRO manager says. “We also tell the aircraft’s OEM that we’re buying that aircraft and why. It’s especially important when dealing with the engines that everyone knows their history.”
Dealing with MRO Overcrowding
The good news about the recent upswing in business aircraft sales and use is the positive light it shines on the value of our industry. The bad news is it’s causing quite a backlog at the major MROs, and it’s another pain point for those responsible for ensuring the airplane is ready when its owners need to fly.
Saving time in the shop is a major goal for both aircraft owners and maintainers. To that end, the trend is to rely more and more on maintenance tracking software. It helps DOMs to plan and schedule maintenance tasks further in advance.
“We ask all our customers for access to their maintenance tracker, even if it’s just read-only,” an MRO manager says. “Something is always coming due, so we can schedule things to get done when they’re here. It makes it 100 times easier.
“Efficiency comes down to planning and scheduling,” he continues. “If the customer can be flexible with their schedule or maybe go to another location, it may help their scheduling.”
Of course, the type of work you need done is a key variable. There may be some flexibility with avionics or interior upgrades. Still, because of the specialized needs of this kind of work, it’s hard to negotiate any scheduling leeway for exterior painting.
“Is this going to last?” asks an MRO manager. “I don’t know, but right now, this is the culture we are dealing with. You need to get in front of the aircraft’s owner and tell them things are taking longer and costing more, but everybody’s dealing with the same thing.”