Sitting in Atlanta’s airport today, enduring delay after delay, I watched many an airliner come in and out of the terminal area. One delay was caused by ‘minor mechanical problems’ (most of the rest were caused by poor weather).
My questions involve maintenance. Delta has a huge maintenance facility at the airport (I understand Atlanta is their base) so obviously they work on many Delta planes there. But what happens if a Delta plane needs service at an airport where they have limited resources?
Would each of the other airlines have maintenance personnel at every airport where they fly? For example, would JetBlue or American have a maintenance team in Atlanta? What about a smaller airport such as Nashville, where American has a limited presence? If not their own people, do the airlines contract out to a common service provider?
I was flying American Connection or Connections or whatever its called, and was on a 48 seat jet round trip between St. Louis and Atlanta. Tight quarters!
In many cases an airplane with a maintenance problem is still flyable, and can legally fly with just the crew on board, but are not allowed to carry passengers. Some more significant problems may require special permission from the FAA or other national regulatory agency, and the flight may have special restrictions put on it. If the problem is major, the airline will contract with a local maintenance source or will fly in a maintenance crew and any required parts.
(When my father was working as an air traffic controller in Gander, Newfoundland during the '50s, a DC-4 went off the end of the runway and suffered serious damage that made it unflyable. At the time there was such a demand for transport airplanes for the construction of the DEW Line/Pine Tree Line radar sites that the airline flew in a crew, disassembled the airplane into its major components, and shipped it by rail/ship/rail back to California for repair.)
FTIW United airlines had a story in the inflight magazine a few months back about how some other airline had a 777 blow an engine in the middle of Africa somewhere. United was contracted to replace the engine. They shipped something like 35 people over there plus every part and tool that they could envision needing. Plane was repaired, and put back into the air.
I don’t even want to know what that road call cost.
35 people working for, lets say a week, all making about 2 grand a week, thats 70 grand in wages. New airplane engine? Well 4 seater engines for airplanes cost about 100 grand, so it’d probably be about a million (lets suppose they can salvage some parts). Now flying all this stuff over, costs of travel etc, probably the whole operation costed $50 000.
IIRC, the MD-11 (beefed up DC-10, actually) has a provision for transporting an extra engine beneath the plane (don’t remember exactly where, but I “think” it is near the root of the right wing). This situation is called “gear down ferry” and I encountered it whilst working on flight path software in the plane’s flight management computer. Apparently the engine interferes with the path of the landing gear retraction and (hence the name) the plane is flown to its destination with the gear down. This feature is used (I was told) to transport a replacement engine to a stranded plane, because many places lack the water/road/rail infrastructure to deliver something that massive in a timely manner. One assumes the installation team and their tools ride in the delivery plane as well. Maybe a line-pilot doper can shed more light on this? (I only encountered it as a programming issue involving nav calculations).
You got it. At many smaller airports the airlines will use contractor services for things that can be handled at gateside. It helps that there’s only a relatively limited range of models of airliner and jet engine operating, and within each manufacturer you’ll have much parts commonality; plus the likelihood that you’ll have the same part break on more than one airliner the same day in the same airport is low.
I’ve been scheduled to fly on a Delta plane out of a smaller airport, Albany, NY, which had mechanical trouble. The repair was provided by a local contractor, but the part had to be delivered on the next scheduled flight from Atlanta. I suspect that might be the case with many regional airports. (Although Albany, by virtue of flights to Toronto, lays claim to international status.
I guess flights by major(ish) airlines into small airports will be done by only a few types of plane - 737s, Fokkers, Saab 340s, all of which would be within the capablilities of the mechanics based at the airport.
If the repair is done with an independent contractor, it would be with one that had been contracted with prior to the problem. They would not ask if there was a mechanic available.
My wife’s airline used to fly SAAB 340’s into Monroe, LA. They would leave that plane for maintenance work and fly out another that had been serviced. The reason was that Delta had a maintenance operation there. Delta has now pulled out of Monroe reluctantly, since believe it or not that is where Delta started business.
I have dated two different airplane mechanics - one worked for United, one worked for Northwest. The guys with the more basic skills tend to stay put in a single airport, but the more skilled ones travel extensively to repair aircraft as needed. One of my friends was the first type (learned it in the Navy), the other one was the second type (got a college degree for it). In the second case, the constant travel was tough so he found another line of work. Given my understanding, this is their preferred method - contracting outside the company is more of a last resort. The mechanics work for the airline, not for the airport.
This ability to carry an extra engine is a modification that some airlines use to transport the larger engines that are not so easily carried inside a freighter or by road. The Boeing 747 and Lockheed 1011 are two more that can be adapted for this purpose. Incidentally neither of those two aircraft have a problem retracting their landing gear when carrying the extra engine.
On the original point about maintenance away from base, an airline would probably have its own staff on a regular scheduled route ( or contacted mechanics if the frequency of the service didn’t merit their own staff). Most faults can be fixed in situ, but my airline flew a type of aircraft that was not widely used by other airlines, this meant that something out of the ordinary ( e.g. engine change) would reguire a team from the base station to travel there by the best available means (air/ road ) to fix it. It was always nice to see a different country - and paid for by the airline
These days internal inspection of engines during maintenance checks usually means problems are identified before they happen. So, not so many trips abroad unfortunately.
It’s not just airline mechanics that get the benefit of travelling to fix things - I was in Prague when our coach broke down, and the company flew a guy out from England purely to deliver one piece of hydarulic pipe!
