9 ms·

U.S. airlines have shifted maintenance work to developing countries

147 points by 2a0c40 11y ago

tomcam 11y ago
I'd like to say something more useful here, but... Holy shit. And congrats to Vanity Fair, of all places,for committing actual journalism.
- CaptainZapp 11y ago
  Vanity Fair, of all places,for committing actual journalism That's not really surprising. Vanity Fair has a long, storied history of great longform journalism and some of the most vernerable American journalists wrote / write for them.
- somberi 11y ago
  VF from its inception had contributed its share to good quality journalism and boasted of many distinguished thinkers, including Hitchens, as its regular contributors.
- notahacker 11y ago
  I dunno, reads like a tabloid smear piece to me, and I suspect I used to speak with more representatives of aircraft MRO facilities per week than the author has managed in their life...
- JshWright 11y ago
  Seemed like a whole lot of scary intimation and not much in the way of facts. Sure, a couple anecdotes of maintenance issues, but no evidence that the rate is any higher than it is in the US. Seems like every other paragraph contained something like this: "Then everything is put back exactly where it was, at least in theory." Suggesting imminent life-threatening danger, without having to worry about any pesky facts to back it up.
gkanai 11y ago
I've noticed this- even Manila is increasingly a location for this sort of maintenance work. I think there should be a place where we as customers can easily see where carriers we may be considering are maintaining their planes and if they have appropriate regulation and oversight for that work.
- intopieces 11y ago
  What would consumers do with this data? It doesn't appear that this is illegal. What recourse do we have against this?
  - johnchristopher 11y ago
    Voting with our feet.
    - intopieces 11y ago
      I'm not sure many consumers have much choice on the matter. Most just go for whatever is cheapest.
      - johnchristopher 11y ago
        But would they go for the cheapest if it was the most insecure and that information clearly presented when booking flights ? I believe they at least could and would balance the risks then. Of course I agree we all have a different economic power (I, for one, have never set foot on a plane) but I have the feeling most of the HN crowd could discriminate between companies.
  - JshWright 11y ago
    What data are you referring to? Why would you need to take any recourse?
- notahacker 11y ago
  I used to sell a database that did that (to a more limited extent than you might imagine), if you have over $10k to spare... All the facilities used by airlines have appropriate regulation. That's why their aircraft are permitted to fly.
imaginator 11y ago
What a horrible article. This article starts with the assumption American=Good/Foreign=Bad. Complete with a scaremongering title. "repair shops thousands of miles away, in developing countries, where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English." Because developing countries are worse at this? Jets are designed to be maintained. It's systematic work. "Take this cowling off. Unscrew that, check this. Replace that." It's not like they are making hard drives. Oh wait. Developing countries already do that. "But the F.A.A. no longer has the money or the manpower to do this." Wait... That sounds like the gist of the article. "FAA underfunded and unable to check check maintenance facilities" Vanity Fair carries on with some more scaremongering: "There are 731 foreign repair shops certified by the F.A.A. around the globe. How qualified are the mechanics in these hundreds of places? It’s very hard to check." I usually like reading Vanity Fair articles. But this one got my "It's not American" xenophobia hackles up.
- leoedin 11y ago
  I agree. Things like: > where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English. Are completely American (or English-speaking anyway) centric and complete scare mongering. English may be the "language of aviation", but that doesn't mean that repair manuals are not allowed to appear in any other language. The picture the article paints is a bunch of idiotic foreigners staring at English instructions, unable to comprehend them. Airbus is essentially a French and German company - do you think every maintenance technician and assembly technician on the assembly line speaks good English? It's not beyond the capabilities of either the big aircraft manufacturers or the large maintenance companies to translate the information their workers need into their local language. It also means you can employ the best people for the job, rather than just people who speak good English.
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    As far as I understand, the reason this is a problem is because the FAA requires English language proficiency. Within that context, this is an anecdote about the ineffectiveness of the FAA at enforcing its regulations, which is troublesome regardless of whether that particular regulation makes any sense, because one typically imagines most regulations regarding aircraft maintenance are probably worth enforcing. (fwiw, I agree with you that this particular regulation probably doesn't make sense, as long as manuals are available in the technician's language. And the article's tone is off-putting. But I think there's a sane and completely rational reason to be concerned by the fact that mechanics don't speak English. It's more of a canary (in light of relevant regulations) than an actual problem unto itself. The solution is probably to bring regulations into the 21st century, and then actually enforce them.)
tomohawk 11y ago
I hate to see these jobs go overseas, but that's the high cost of over regulation. This article's main example is of a maintenance problem with a foreign aircraft maintained and flown outside the US. It's unclear what the FAA could do about that. Also, the article cites incidents, but has no evidence as to whether this is better or worse than the previous heavily regulated and unionized system. I can cite my own anecdotes passed on to me by family members who were commercial pilots in the US about shoddy maintenance by US mechanics, and how these problems seemed to mysteriously spike when a new labor contract was on the table. If there's a real problem here, too bad the article doesn't get to it.
- brc 11y ago
  Without knowing the details I suspected unions would be partially responsible. I know that the incidence of 'accidents' spikes remarkably around negotiation time. The last time I read about this, the airline was fighting the unions when suddenly two 747s 'accidntally' collided while under tow in lax. What a surprise.
  - ubernostrum 11y ago
    Unions in negotiation, in the airline business, don't crash planes into each other, and you should feel ashamed for suggesting that they would. The actual common tactic is using a variant of work-to-rule. Normally, maintenance crews can "backfill" their bureaucracy a bit after the physical work on an aircraft is done, which means the plane is going back into service while they file the paperwork. During a protest action, instead they refuse to release the plane for service until every last bit of relevant paperwork has been filled out, signed, stamped, filed in triplicate and multiple receipts issued for it, which can involve tracking down a lot of people all over the airport to fill out and sign things. Which is technically what the procedures require, but basically never happens outside of a time when the maintenance union wants to gain leverage over the airline. If you've ever been on a flight which had minor maintenance done at the gate, and then sat for 45 minutes while they "waited on the logbook", that was likely a work-to-rule action by the union.
- leaveyou 11y ago
lucaspiller 11y ago
Whether or not the maintenance is any good, as a passenger the best airline I've flown with in terms of apparent maintenance (i.e. everything looks like it works) and cleanliness is Emirates. I flew with BA a couple of months ago (in business) and the aircraft were filthy and very old.
stevenstremciuc 11y ago
I can't speak for every one of the facilities mentioned in the article, but for one of the airlines mentioned that has work done in the Aeroman facility in El Salvador, the airline staffs American F.A.A. certified mechanics with decades of experience to oversee the operations performed at the facility.
narrator 11y ago
The greatest economic mystery of the last 50 years is "why is everything so cheap in developing countries?". It's surprising that more people aren't fascinated by this mystery. Why is it so cheap for workers at this plant to obtain a vocational education and support themselves? Why is it so cheap to operate the plant? What is the ultimate cost driver in developed countries that makes everything so much more expensive? What's odd is that some developing countries, like Angola, are absurdly expensive.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- notahacker 11y ago
  The ultimate cost driver in developed countries is low salaries and low to zero costs of real estate, which are of course interlinked. There's nothing especially odd about Angola. It's cheap to live in... if you're happy with an Angolan standard of living and the unusually high probability of being subject to violent crime in most parts. A risk which means that the minority of comfortable and safe places to live in and shops which import luxuries local people can't afford (like many basic foodstuffs...) can charge what they like to expats that don't have a lot of choice and do have cost-of-living adjustments and danger money added to their already high-by-Western-standards oil-worker salaries.
  - brc 11y ago
    The role of absurdly high real estate costs is something that is very infrequently discussed, but very important. As all businesses rely on land, labour, energy and resources, a big increase in any of those three has flow on effects.
- mseebach 11y ago
  It's not been a mystery at all for about 200 years, that might be why. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776: "If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage. The general industry of the country, being always in proportion to the capital which employs it, will not thereby be diminished ... but only left to find out the way in which it can be employed with the greatest advantage." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
abalashov 11y ago
Although somewhat alarming on the face of it, it's hard for the untrained observer to say whether this merits deep systemic concern or whether it's largely more scaremongering about things being done in foreign places. 1. The article cites numerous examples of problems in recent years that have been attributed somehow to improper maintenance in developing world facilities, but doesn't discuss the statistical or historical incidence of maintenance errors for domestic aircraft maintenance and overhauls. Could it be that these problems, however sensational they sound when juxtaposed with China or El Salvador, have always been with us? At roughly the same rate? 2. Despite the fact that this trend has been seemingly ongoing for more than a decade now, recent statistics suggest that the last decade has been unprecedentedly safe in the history of aviation: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/27/globalpost-flying-safe/70534422/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/27/globalpo... http://qz.com/318534/despite-a-spike-in-deaths-2014-has-seen-the-fewest-plane-crashes-in-the-modern-aviation-era/ http://qz.com/318534/despite-a-spike-in-deaths-2014-has-seen... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safest-year-for-airlines-globally-since-1945.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safe... Of course, it's possible we are the beneficiaries of uncannily favourable coincidences, but the point is, there's an explanatory burden in why, if offshore maintenance were truly the problem the article insinuates it is, it doesn't make a more pronounced actuarial mark. 3. Despite the sensation that discussions of flight safety evoke (due perhaps to our sense of its innate precariousness, at some instinctual level), it may well be that airplanes are by far not the most quantitatively-statistically significant thing built or maintained in the developing world to which we entrust our safety. Except for those with a preternatural knack for somehow avoiding travel by automobile, we have, do, and will again entrust our lives on a daily basis to assembly code written by Japanese, Korean, and probably Chinese programmers. A great deal of manufactured products, industrial materials, and other artifacts of modernity are manufactured in the developing world. If this alone were truly a life-and-limb disaster in the making, as the article implies, one would think it would be reflected in widespread mortality of all sorts, everywhere.
pjc50 11y ago
The other day this anecdote was going around on metafilter, the "DC 2 1/2": http://www.cnac.org/aircraft02.htm http://www.cnac.org/aircraft02.htm where for wartime expediency reasons a DC-2 was fitted and flown with a DC-3 wing on one side, which was about 5 feet shorter. The article contains this sentence: "Disaster was close, too close; the mechanics mated the wing, bolts went in, the two butted nicely, they called me to tell me the bottom would not pull up butt to butt, although all bolts went through. Upon inspection, I found that Douglas inspecotors failed to see that the bottom wing bulb angles were not properly trimmed, thus the gap. I complimented our Chinese mechanics. Men of lesser experience might have tried to pull the angles together and a fatal crash would have followed. Douglas was advised via Andy Priester. I cannot praise our Chinese mechanics enough. Once trained and well led, they could be compared to the very best."
ucaetano 11y ago
I usually read VF and New Yorker articles pretending to be an aristocratic American from a century ago: "Dear Lord, we are flying in airplanes maintained by heathen savages in faraway nations? This is absolutely shocking, I demand changes now!"
ptaipale 11y ago
Hey, that's good. I mean, if those countries are "developing countries", not just "underdeveloped countries". So we avoid the usual tone where "developing" actually means "not developed and never going to develop". 70 years ago hardly anyone was thinking that they'd drive a car made by a Japanese company. 30 years ago hardly anyone was thinking they'd do their daily correspondence through a smartphone that was manufactured in China. 20 years from now hardly anyone will think twice about flying in a plane whose regular maintenance is done in Mexico, China, Romania, Estonia or whatever -- and possibly even designed and made in China. (After all, 25 years ago not that many were thinking that the British Airways plane they flew was actually maintained by cheaper labour from Finland, and today we fly in planes made in Brazil, which many also call a "developing country".). But this article... cheap xenophobic fearmongering.
JSeymourATL 11y ago
Perhaps the airlines should start outsourcing to Cuba. Cuban mecánicos are world renown for their bang-up work keeping old-timey Detroit built 30s-40s-50s era cars on the road for years.
yarper 11y ago
Most comments on here regarding xenophobia etc seem to be missing the overall point of this article. The real issue is that these companies and individuals cannot be held accountable by the FAA. Usually every single item of work can only be officially signed off (which makes you legally responsible for it) by somebody the regulator considers qualified to do so. If it later turns out that that particular job was done incorrectly a paper trail follows directly to the individual(s) responsible. Not surprisingly this kind of accountability makes your average engineer very diligent. If you have a lot of engineers that are not accredited and so cannot legally approve work (someone comes in and rubber-stamps everything), or are based in a country with a sketchy legal system you're gonna have a bad time upholding standards, regardless of how "good" the engineers are and the quality of their English. It would be xenophobic if the FAA was freaking out about work done in Europe, Canada, Australia etc too - but it isn't.
mikelyons 11y ago
From a Boeing Senior Manager: Actual, with the volume of airplanes sold to non-domestic carriers the need to have foreign companies maintain them is very important. It is important that the global capability to fix/repair and maintain the airplanes grows with the demand in order to assure safe reliable flight. The world is full of MRO’s, (maintenance repair and overhaul) centers for many years. So this is not new.

147 points by 2a0c40 11y ago

I'd like to say something more useful here, but... Holy shit. And congrats to Vanity Fair, of all places,for committing actual journalism.

CaptainZapp 11y ago
Vanity Fair, of all places,for committing actual journalism That's not really surprising. Vanity Fair has a long, storied history of great longform journalism and some of the most vernerable American journalists wrote / write for them.
somberi 11y ago
VF from its inception had contributed its share to good quality journalism and boasted of many distinguished thinkers, including Hitchens, as its regular contributors.
notahacker 11y ago
I dunno, reads like a tabloid smear piece to me, and I suspect I used to speak with more representatives of aircraft MRO facilities per week than the author has managed in their life...
JshWright 11y ago
Seemed like a whole lot of scary intimation and not much in the way of facts. Sure, a couple anecdotes of maintenance issues, but no evidence that the rate is any higher than it is in the US. Seems like every other paragraph contained something like this: "Then everything is put back exactly where it was, at least in theory." Suggesting imminent life-threatening danger, without having to worry about any pesky facts to back it up.

gkanai 11y ago

I've noticed this- even Manila is increasingly a location for this sort of maintenance work. I think there should be a place where we as customers can easily see where carriers we may be considering are maintaining their planes and if they have appropriate regulation and oversight for that work.

intopieces 11y ago
What would consumers do with this data? It doesn't appear that this is illegal. What recourse do we have against this?
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  Voting with our feet.
  - intopieces 11y ago
    I'm not sure many consumers have much choice on the matter. Most just go for whatever is cheapest.
    - johnchristopher 11y ago
      But would they go for the cheapest if it was the most insecure and that information clearly presented when booking flights ? I believe they at least could and would balance the risks then. Of course I agree we all have a different economic power (I, for one, have never set foot on a plane) but I have the feeling most of the HN crowd could discriminate between companies.
- JshWright 11y ago
  What data are you referring to? Why would you need to take any recourse?
notahacker 11y ago
I used to sell a database that did that (to a more limited extent than you might imagine), if you have over $10k to spare... All the facilities used by airlines have appropriate regulation. That's why their aircraft are permitted to fly.

imaginator 11y ago

What a horrible article. This article starts with the assumption American=Good/Foreign=Bad. Complete with a scaremongering title. "repair shops thousands of miles away, in developing countries, where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English." Because developing countries are worse at this? Jets are designed to be maintained. It's systematic work. "Take this cowling off. Unscrew that, check this. Replace that." It's not like they are making hard drives. Oh wait. Developing countries already do that. "But the F.A.A. no longer has the money or the manpower to do this." Wait... That sounds like the gist of the article. "FAA underfunded and unable to check check maintenance facilities" Vanity Fair carries on with some more scaremongering: "There are 731 foreign repair shops certified by the F.A.A. around the globe. How qualified are the mechanics in these hundreds of places? It’s very hard to check." I usually like reading Vanity Fair articles. But this one got my "It's not American" xenophobia hackles up.

leoedin 11y ago
I agree. Things like: > where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English. Are completely American (or English-speaking anyway) centric and complete scare mongering. English may be the "language of aviation", but that doesn't mean that repair manuals are not allowed to appear in any other language. The picture the article paints is a bunch of idiotic foreigners staring at English instructions, unable to comprehend them. Airbus is essentially a French and German company - do you think every maintenance technician and assembly technician on the assembly line speaks good English? It's not beyond the capabilities of either the big aircraft manufacturers or the large maintenance companies to translate the information their workers need into their local language. It also means you can employ the best people for the job, rather than just people who speak good English.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  As far as I understand, the reason this is a problem is because the FAA requires English language proficiency. Within that context, this is an anecdote about the ineffectiveness of the FAA at enforcing its regulations, which is troublesome regardless of whether that particular regulation makes any sense, because one typically imagines most regulations regarding aircraft maintenance are probably worth enforcing. (fwiw, I agree with you that this particular regulation probably doesn't make sense, as long as manuals are available in the technician's language. And the article's tone is off-putting. But I think there's a sane and completely rational reason to be concerned by the fact that mechanics don't speak English. It's more of a canary (in light of relevant regulations) than an actual problem unto itself. The solution is probably to bring regulations into the 21st century, and then actually enforce them.)

tomohawk 11y ago

I hate to see these jobs go overseas, but that's the high cost of over regulation. This article's main example is of a maintenance problem with a foreign aircraft maintained and flown outside the US. It's unclear what the FAA could do about that. Also, the article cites incidents, but has no evidence as to whether this is better or worse than the previous heavily regulated and unionized system. I can cite my own anecdotes passed on to me by family members who were commercial pilots in the US about shoddy maintenance by US mechanics, and how these problems seemed to mysteriously spike when a new labor contract was on the table. If there's a real problem here, too bad the article doesn't get to it.

brc 11y ago
Without knowing the details I suspected unions would be partially responsible. I know that the incidence of 'accidents' spikes remarkably around negotiation time. The last time I read about this, the airline was fighting the unions when suddenly two 747s 'accidntally' collided while under tow in lax. What a surprise.
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  Unions in negotiation, in the airline business, don't crash planes into each other, and you should feel ashamed for suggesting that they would. The actual common tactic is using a variant of work-to-rule. Normally, maintenance crews can "backfill" their bureaucracy a bit after the physical work on an aircraft is done, which means the plane is going back into service while they file the paperwork. During a protest action, instead they refuse to release the plane for service until every last bit of relevant paperwork has been filled out, signed, stamped, filed in triplicate and multiple receipts issued for it, which can involve tracking down a lot of people all over the airport to fill out and sign things. Which is technically what the procedures require, but basically never happens outside of a time when the maintenance union wants to gain leverage over the airline. If you've ever been on a flight which had minor maintenance done at the gate, and then sat for 45 minutes while they "waited on the logbook", that was likely a work-to-rule action by the union.
leaveyou 11y ago

lucaspiller 11y ago

Whether or not the maintenance is any good, as a passenger the best airline I've flown with in terms of apparent maintenance (i.e. everything looks like it works) and cleanliness is Emirates. I flew with BA a couple of months ago (in business) and the aircraft were filthy and very old.

stevenstremciuc 11y ago

I can't speak for every one of the facilities mentioned in the article, but for one of the airlines mentioned that has work done in the Aeroman facility in El Salvador, the airline staffs American F.A.A. certified mechanics with decades of experience to oversee the operations performed at the facility.

narrator 11y ago

The greatest economic mystery of the last 50 years is "why is everything so cheap in developing countries?". It's surprising that more people aren't fascinated by this mystery. Why is it so cheap for workers at this plant to obtain a vocational education and support themselves? Why is it so cheap to operate the plant? What is the ultimate cost driver in developed countries that makes everything so much more expensive? What's odd is that some developing countries, like Angola, are absurdly expensive.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
notahacker 11y ago
The ultimate cost driver in developed countries is low salaries and low to zero costs of real estate, which are of course interlinked. There's nothing especially odd about Angola. It's cheap to live in... if you're happy with an Angolan standard of living and the unusually high probability of being subject to violent crime in most parts. A risk which means that the minority of comfortable and safe places to live in and shops which import luxuries local people can't afford (like many basic foodstuffs...) can charge what they like to expats that don't have a lot of choice and do have cost-of-living adjustments and danger money added to their already high-by-Western-standards oil-worker salaries.
- brc 11y ago
  The role of absurdly high real estate costs is something that is very infrequently discussed, but very important. As all businesses rely on land, labour, energy and resources, a big increase in any of those three has flow on effects.
mseebach 11y ago
It's not been a mystery at all for about 200 years, that might be why. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776: "If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry employed in a way in which we have some advantage. The general industry of the country, being always in proportion to the capital which employs it, will not thereby be diminished ... but only left to find out the way in which it can be employed with the greatest advantage." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

abalashov 11y ago

Although somewhat alarming on the face of it, it's hard for the untrained observer to say whether this merits deep systemic concern or whether it's largely more scaremongering about things being done in foreign places. 1. The article cites numerous examples of problems in recent years that have been attributed somehow to improper maintenance in developing world facilities, but doesn't discuss the statistical or historical incidence of maintenance errors for domestic aircraft maintenance and overhauls. Could it be that these problems, however sensational they sound when juxtaposed with China or El Salvador, have always been with us? At roughly the same rate? 2. Despite the fact that this trend has been seemingly ongoing for more than a decade now, recent statistics suggest that the last decade has been unprecedentedly safe in the history of aviation: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/27/globalpost-flying-safe/70534422/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/27/globalpo... http://qz.com/318534/despite-a-spike-in-deaths-2014-has-seen-the-fewest-plane-crashes-in-the-modern-aviation-era/ http://qz.com/318534/despite-a-spike-in-deaths-2014-has-seen... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safest-year-for-airlines-globally-since-1945.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safe... Of course, it's possible we are the beneficiaries of uncannily favourable coincidences, but the point is, there's an explanatory burden in why, if offshore maintenance were truly the problem the article insinuates it is, it doesn't make a more pronounced actuarial mark. 3. Despite the sensation that discussions of flight safety evoke (due perhaps to our sense of its innate precariousness, at some instinctual level), it may well be that airplanes are by far not the most quantitatively-statistically significant thing built or maintained in the developing world to which we entrust our safety. Except for those with a preternatural knack for somehow avoiding travel by automobile, we have, do, and will again entrust our lives on a daily basis to assembly code written by Japanese, Korean, and probably Chinese programmers. A great deal of manufactured products, industrial materials, and other artifacts of modernity are manufactured in the developing world. If this alone were truly a life-and-limb disaster in the making, as the article implies, one would think it would be reflected in widespread mortality of all sorts, everywhere.

pjc50 11y ago

The other day this anecdote was going around on metafilter, the "DC 2 1/2": http://www.cnac.org/aircraft02.htm http://www.cnac.org/aircraft02.htm where for wartime expediency reasons a DC-2 was fitted and flown with a DC-3 wing on one side, which was about 5 feet shorter. The article contains this sentence: "Disaster was close, too close; the mechanics mated the wing, bolts went in, the two butted nicely, they called me to tell me the bottom would not pull up butt to butt, although all bolts went through. Upon inspection, I found that Douglas inspecotors failed to see that the bottom wing bulb angles were not properly trimmed, thus the gap. I complimented our Chinese mechanics. Men of lesser experience might have tried to pull the angles together and a fatal crash would have followed. Douglas was advised via Andy Priester. I cannot praise our Chinese mechanics enough. Once trained and well led, they could be compared to the very best."

ucaetano 11y ago

I usually read VF and New Yorker articles pretending to be an aristocratic American from a century ago: "Dear Lord, we are flying in airplanes maintained by heathen savages in faraway nations? This is absolutely shocking, I demand changes now!"

ptaipale 11y ago

Hey, that's good. I mean, if those countries are "developing countries", not just "underdeveloped countries". So we avoid the usual tone where "developing" actually means "not developed and never going to develop". 70 years ago hardly anyone was thinking that they'd drive a car made by a Japanese company. 30 years ago hardly anyone was thinking they'd do their daily correspondence through a smartphone that was manufactured in China. 20 years from now hardly anyone will think twice about flying in a plane whose regular maintenance is done in Mexico, China, Romania, Estonia or whatever -- and possibly even designed and made in China. (After all, 25 years ago not that many were thinking that the British Airways plane they flew was actually maintained by cheaper labour from Finland, and today we fly in planes made in Brazil, which many also call a "developing country".). But this article... cheap xenophobic fearmongering.

JSeymourATL 11y ago

Perhaps the airlines should start outsourcing to Cuba. Cuban mecánicos are world renown for their bang-up work keeping old-timey Detroit built 30s-40s-50s era cars on the road for years.

yarper 11y ago

Most comments on here regarding xenophobia etc seem to be missing the overall point of this article. The real issue is that these companies and individuals cannot be held accountable by the FAA. Usually every single item of work can only be officially signed off (which makes you legally responsible for it) by somebody the regulator considers qualified to do so. If it later turns out that that particular job was done incorrectly a paper trail follows directly to the individual(s) responsible. Not surprisingly this kind of accountability makes your average engineer very diligent. If you have a lot of engineers that are not accredited and so cannot legally approve work (someone comes in and rubber-stamps everything), or are based in a country with a sketchy legal system you're gonna have a bad time upholding standards, regardless of how "good" the engineers are and the quality of their English. It would be xenophobic if the FAA was freaking out about work done in Europe, Canada, Australia etc too - but it isn't.

mikelyons 11y ago

From a Boeing Senior Manager: Actual, with the volume of airplanes sold to non-domestic carriers the need to have foreign companies maintain them is very important. It is important that the global capability to fix/repair and maintain the airplanes grows with the demand in order to assure safe reliable flight. The world is full of MRO’s, (maintenance repair and overhaul) centers for many years. So this is not new.