Jet Blue, outsourcing airplane repairs a problem? El Salvador in the mix too.

Recently, by chance, I managed to catch the amazing landing of the Jet blue plane with the locked front landing gear making a landing.

I was happy that everyone got out ok. But, recently a report came out that confirmed once again my theory that El Salvador somehow always appears in the background of major news:

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10360

Of course the FAA and congress can monitor those repairs made overseas, no?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/20/AR2005082000979.html

More than a discussion, I want to know what are the current laws or policies regarding the training and experience of repair crews overseas, any progress in congress? Do you think what airlines are doing, regarding quality and safety, is enough? It is really a good idea to make repairs overseas?

It’s not like these countries don’t have their own airlines- and they’re planes arn’t falling out of the sky on a daily basis. As long as they arn’t hiring the guys who fix planes for Air Cubana, I’m happy to have cheaper tickets.

Yes, TACA. I remember it well. Known amongst old Central America hacks like myself as ‘Take a Coffin Along’. Honduran airline SAHSA was fondly rendered as ‘Stay At Home, Stay Alive’.

I had the chilling experience of sitting aboard a TACA (or was it COPA?) flight on a stopover at San Salvador airport en route to Managua, while they loaded the coffins of the victims of the air disaster, several days previously, when a plane had crashed into the San Vicente volcano. The colleague I was travelling with should have been on that flight, but changed connections on a whim. His travel companions warned him that it was bad luck to change… that’s the last he ever saw of them.

I think that to be fair, we should look at a comprehensive analysis of the safety record of the planes being worked on by El Salvadorian mechanics. Furthermore, we should assess how many of these safety issues are due to mechanical issues or completely separate ones such as controlled flight into terrain in which Martha’s colleague’s colleague’s perished.

As it seems to happen, the basic design of the aircraft is at fault. Nose wheel locking at ninety degrees incidents have occurred on the A-320 eleven times and I tend to think that this is Airbus’s fault rather than JetBlue’s or whomever they contract out mechanical work to. Also, I’m not entirely clear on how the article is attempting to use the term, “long-term maintenance,” but I understand that it really only refers to reconstruction after damage or refitting engines, etc. rather than basic or everyday maintenance. So, the plane will head to El Salvador now, but as it stands we don’t know if an El Salvadorian mechanic has yet to lay hands on the landing gear of this plane, let alone that it was his fault in causing the accident, nor that an American mechanic would have a lower incidence rate of performing the same mistakes or negligence to cause the aircraft nose to lock up.

Right now, it seems more like a gut reaction of hearing, “El Salvador? That place sucks. Let’s blame the accident on them!”

Actually, the current incarnations of TACA and COPA are quite fine competent airlines equipment and labor-wise – at least in their international routes. When you hear horror stories about airline safety elsewhere in the world it’s often in relation to the domestic carriers and routes, which tend to be served by back-bencher crews on older aircraft, often on high-cycle schedules, to airports often short on NavAids, in dodgy terrain and treacherous weather.(Thus, when flying to C-A myself, I’ll seek to do a one-stop, Home to Panama City to Destination, to avoid finding myself on the air equivalent of the #2 train.)

It’s not as if Airbus’s specs and tech manuals are different in San Salvador vs. in Toulouse or in Miami. They may not have all passed the FAA exam but it’s not like they’re hiring illiterate peones off of Juan Valdez’s plantation either. I have a suspicion that what Jet Blue pays them for the servicing may look cheap to us, but to them it’s a big payday and one they want to keep coming.

Still, the valid concern in the report is about not being able to maintain the preferred degree of control and oversight, specially IRT the staff screening. Also it’s taking something of a gamble on local stability – you bet your sweet beepee they would NOT have outsourced to El Salvador 15 years ago even if they promised a staff where even the janitor were a Ph.D. in aerodynamics…

I do think, at least in the maintenance of planes, that they don’t suck, the major complain IMO is that companies should have gone the overseas route only after establishing independent safety and oversight of the maintenance of planes, that are supposed to fly mostly in the domestic USA skies.

More background..

However,

In theory at least, repair stations outside the US are subject to the same requirements as domestic ones for approval to work on US-registered aircraft. In practice, there are, well, variations, but it would seem that they’re more a result of cost-cutting and training than nationality. The A320 (the JetBlue aircraft) does have a significant history of problems with its French-made nose gear, which may be unrelated to maintenance at all.

The airline I worked for in London was an authorised FAA repair station. The requirements you mentioned were kept both in theory and in practice.
We were regularly inspected by the FAA to ensure this. There were no"variations".

I’m no illiterate peone, yet there’s no way that I’m competent enough to service an A320, with or without a manual. What’s the point in requiring FAA licensing if it can be circumvented by sending the planes down to Central America for their servicing?

If it’s a requirement that planes being serviced within the United States are only to be maintained by licensed mechanics, then the same should be true outside of the United States also. Either get rid of the licensing altogether, or apply the standard uniformly.

What is the point of any of our labor regulations and licensing? Right now, I can’t buy a pair of shoes made in the US by an indentured servant, but I could buy some made through indentured servitude in Thailand. Applying our labor standards worldwide would be next to impossible.

[QUOTE=Dominic Mulligan]
I’m no illiterate peone, yet there’s no way that I’m competent enough to service an A320, with or without a manual.
[/quote[

(The singular is peón.) And around the world every year a few thousand 18-year-olds fresh off the farm go from knowing diddly about avionics to being competent to service F16s within a few months. A well-trained Salvadoran or Panamanian technician, having completed the requisite manufacturer-approved courses, given the proper tools and materials, should do just as good a job as the guys currently striking Northwest. I would worry whether indeed s/he does get equivalent conditions IRT tools, materials, working environment, hours, etc., but that would affect an FAA licensed mechanic too…

What JetBlue and others are “circumventing” is NOT American government regulation, it’s American market COSTS. In any case it’s **not ** that the FAA requires that to fly in US airspace the plane must have been serviced by FAA licensees (otherwise how could any foreign airline fly to the USA?), it requires FAA licenses for the people who want to fix airplanes in the USA.

The FAA HAS blackballed airlines from flying into the USA for inadequate standards (e.g. all airlines based in the Dominican Republic, at one time in the 1990s), it’s not as if overhauling the plane offshore is a carte blance and the FAA can’t touch you.

It’s not as if the Salvadoran Civil Aviation Ministry does not license mechanics. The question is if they pass the same standard as the FAA’s – and from what has been quoted of the article, it seems our guys are more concerned about the other countries matching us on such things as pre-employment screenings and post-employment drug tests, besides actual technical skills competence. And don’t forget, in order to authorize servicing of other carriers’ Airbuses at the TACA shop, Airbus Industrie itself would have to give a go-ahead, so there’s that oversight too.
As long as sovereign nations are around, (a) Any repair facility INSIDE the USA = everyone must pass the FAA test; (b) Any repair facility outside the USA = we must enter negotiations with THEM to persuade them to adopt the equivalent of our regulations.

Please. There’s a profound difference between a flying bomb filled carrying hundreds of people with tonnes of aviation fuel onboard being serviced by a potential incompetent and you buying a pair of shoes from Thailand.

The difference being those fresh-from-the-farm teenagers and a mechanic in El Salvador is that they have a guaranteed level of competence before they’re even allowed near a plane, and are regularly tested to confirm that they are in fact competent. Now, the article doesn’t mention whether the mechanics working on planes are licensed to El Salvadoran standards. If they are, then I retract my claims, but I had inferred that the mechanics were not licensed in any way.

From the site sponsored of the Transport Workers Union, who I get the feeling would not be big fans of outsourcing:

Of course, some of these reports are based on self-reporting so like hell I’d take it as Gospel, but still it seems a fact that there IS Salvadoran licensing and a manufacturer-approved apprenticeship, the question becoming whether the standards are fully equivalent. The biggest concern, not only in the union’s article but in GIGObuster’s second quoted article is about retention and turnover (i.e. accumulated experience and reliability record) when price-shopping to ANY “outside contracting” shop, in or out of the USA; in fact the most serious incidents described in that article involved 3rd-party contractors IN the USA: