A Battle for Our Profession

 Mechanics Face the Threat of Outsourcing

 By: Chris Moore, Teamster Continental Airlines mechanic, Houston 

 Brothers and Sisters,

Make no mistake; we are in a battle for the future of our profession. Recently I attended the 7^th annual Aircraft Maintenance Outsourcing Conference of the Americas. My mission was to get a glimpse of what the airlines and the vendors have in mind for our futures and I must say it doesn’t look pretty. Presently the airlines see aircraft maintenance as one of the costliest aspects of their businesses. As we have seen over the past decade, many carriers have shed their overhaul operations in an effort to free up capital, costing our professionals thousands of jobs. While some of this work went back to the original equipment manufacturer, such as engine overhaul, hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work have been shipped off shore to facilities that may or may not have the oversight required to ensure aircraft safety. Look for this trend to continue as the airlines look for more cost savings and the third party maintenance vendors look to grow their businesses.

Another disturbing industry trend is the outsourcing of line maintenance. Once considered part of an airline’s core business, line maintenance appeared to be one of the aspects of aircraft maintenance that would not be outsourced. Skybus Airlines is changing all of that. Skybus, a start-up low-cost carrier flying an all Airbus fleet, has contracted with Airbus to provide all of their maintenance, including line maintenance. Airbus, in turn, contracts with a third party to perform the actual maintenance. Airbus believes that up to 25 percent of the line maintenance market could be outsourced within the next 10 years. But Skybus is not an isolated case. Boeing is introducing GoldCare, a complete maintenance package available with the new 787 and Lufthansa Technik offers similar packages for airlines from heavy maintenance to line maintenance.

This is just a snapshot of the direction our industry is headed. If the vendors can convince the airlines that they no longer need in-house mechanics, we will continue to lose our jobs to third party maintenance providers. We as Teamsters need to stand together to show the industry that we are a valuable component in this equation and that a partnership with organized labor will benefit both the airlines and the mechanics in the end.