U.S. airlines have shifted maintenance work to developing countries
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
"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.
> 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.
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.)
The prior work is written up and signed off in English, the pilot/cabin tech logs will all be written up in English. The current AD/SBs (usually extra maintenance/fixes) will all be issued in English and so on.
Further to that you have to write the work up in English, and get it signed off and declared safe to fly in English too.
Other parts of the world already operate on non-English, e.g. Russia. They use the same aircraft we do but in an entirely different framework. However their framework does not necessarily apply if you want to get an aircraft cleared to fly in Europe (EASA) or the states (FAA).
My mom has a foundry here in Slovenia and at some point she decided to outsource production of some relatively easy stuff to China, because it seemed cheaper. Well, suffice it to say she stopped after the first batch arrived, in which only about 30% of products were up to standards, which are easy to track in die casting: a few precise measurements and an X-ray, all totalling 5 minutes of work.
So the point is (usually): underdeveloped countries === cheaper and less educated labour + less oversight + lower quality. A recipe for disaster. But as long as profits go up it's not a big deal, right?
I'll be concerned when I hear statistical evidence of higher failure rates from overseas shops. There are plenty of anecdotes of developed-country maintenance crews making serious mistakes - including one responsible for crashing a Concorde and killing everyone on board.
You seem to be implying that this personal anecdote isn't representative of a larger trend, which is strange.
It's certainly possible to do business with developing countries, but one has to be especially careful with regards to work quality. This is neither new or xenophobic. Claiming otherwise is absurd.
With aviation and other life-and-death products, I find these concerns to be especially relevant.
Moreover, I (respectfully!) contend that your comment is a prime example of political correctness pushed to a dangerous extreme. Just because it's a stereotype doesn't mean it isn't mostly true, unpalatable though that thought may be. It so happens that Chinese people eat a lot of rice, and Chinese manufacturers have a rich history of cutting costs by deceitfully degrading quality. These two statements are neither false nor bigoted.
In what sense does a single data point represent a trend?
> It's certainly possible to do business with developing countries, but one has to be especially careful with regards to work quality.
You also need to be careful of work quality from developed countries. There is no shortage of examples of shoddy work being done in developed countries.
It doesn't. It's the other way around: a single datapoint can be congruent or incongruent with an observed and measured trend. This is the case with the present example.
>You also need to be careful of work quality from developed countries.
You always have to be careful of craftsmanship, but to imply that there's no systematic variance as a function of national origin is disingenuous at best and insane at worst.
Again, I'm positively flabbergasted by the extent to which people want to play with words and run in circles around such issues, especially given the extent to which these problems are documented.
Has it really become that taboo to observe that certain countries have a poor track record, on the whole? Am I only allowed to criticize my home country, now?
Yes, you're repeating yourself.
> It only makes sense to evaluate things on a case by case basis.
I disagree. Case-by-case evaluation is necessary, but general trends are highly informative, useful, and not intrinsically racist/xenophobe/bigoted.
You're arguing that we should ignore evidence on the basis of political correctness, and I'm arguing that this is silly and dangerous.
I'm arguing that we should only consider evidence. You're arguing in favour of generalisations and prejudice.
This is false, and borders on an outright lie, as evidenced by the fact that you're actively endorsing the dismissal of documented evidence on accounts of political correctness.
I invite you to re-read this entire conversation, and the absurdity of your comment will be apparent.
That is truly and honestly good to hear!
>I'm in favour of considering data at a finer granularity than you are in order to obtain a more accurate picture.
I understand where you're coming from, but interactions are only interpretable after you've considered the main effects. To be sure, I'm not advocating that people not employ finer-grained measures, but in evaluating risk, you must consider overall trends (if only to discover that your specific case is an exception).
Moreover, a healthy intellectual environment demands that we be able to discuss large trends without being accused of bigotry.
>Is it better to use the generalisation about that country having a poor education system, or the more detailed case-specific facts?
This is a false dichotomy. It's note one or the other. I will -- again -- repeat my arguments:
1. We should consider both large trends and specific cases.
2. Considering general trends -- which necessarily imply some non-trivial degree of generalization -- is not xenophobic in and of itself.
3. Willful ignorance (in the sense of "ignoring") of large trends is a Bad Thing.
I'm willing to believe you have no interest in political correctness, but then I must insist that your rhetoric is in contradiction with your values. You're ultimately endorsing something you oppose.
If you let me chime in: by odd coincidence, we use a Slovenian contractor for aluminium die casting of our products. We have troubles with missed deadlines, non-negotiated requirements (like rising minimum batch size years into production) and poor communication.
Does our isolated experience represent a trend with, shall I call it, Eastern Europe?
It may well be representative of a larger trend within Slovenia (or eastern Europe). I don't know.
I can only speak for China (and certain parts of Western Europe, i.e. Italy).
The issue seems to be getting that evidence, when the airlines have a strong disincentive not to report broken planes and the FAA finds it hard (for reasons of resources and the mechanics of travelling to a distant facility) to surprise-inspect facilities. That's not unique to offshored facilities, though.
I think this is a complete non-issue for everyone except US-based Airframe & Powerplant mechanics. If you're worried about aviation safety, don't fly on regional carriers in Eastern Europe, South America, or any third-world country. Flying on any major (for flights operated by the major, not under a codeshare) is the safest form of long distance travel by quite a wide margin.
On the small private planes that I fly, we have annual inspections where the airplane is carefully inspected and in order to do that, lots of disassembly and re-assembly is required. It's inherently dangerous, and I do an extremely careful pre-flight and will not take passengers on the first flight post-maintenance. I've found an oil line only finger tight (dumped oil directly onto the exhaust at any speed over 1700 RPM), various electrical and avionics anomalies, and other smaller mechanical issues. And in my case, this is all done by FAA-certified, English-speaking, hard-working, dedicated A&Ps right here in the good old USA. That you can find examples of maintenance errors from overseas repair shops is unsurprising; it's because you can find it from any repair shop.
So your expectation is that you can do it cheaper elsewhere to the same level of quality? There is high quality manufacturing in China and many companies do that. You can't expect to the the level of quality you want sending some plans over to a remote country to a dumping price.
For how good Chinese manufacturing can be just look at your apple computer.
The difference between Apple and FAA? Apple has nearly unlimited resources, so they can be present on site to make sure quality is top notch. FAA does not. Oversight makes all the difference.
Any outsourcing only makes sense if you have a high volume of goods. I can have a better quality control producing something here locally than to outsource it to the other side of the pond, even if the country is technologically more advanced than my own just because I lose the ability to oversee the process.
None of that is relevant to the FAA though. The FAA has a funding problem. It should play absolutely no role where planes are maintained. This is a general problem in the US where governmental oversight is traditionally badly funded. Even the IRS has not nearly enough employees for the job they do.
Herein lies the reason. Chinese factories will manufacture things with as much quality as you want, provided you pay accordingly. Pay for a good product, you'll get a good product. Pretty much all of electronics you use, including the most high-end devices, was made in China. Most of the Western "Chinese = crap" stereotype seems to be because of Western companies, which pay for low-quality manufacturing.
Also, consider that this "less developed country" builds nuclear reactors, has a space program, and runs better metro lines than most of Europe. They somehow manage not to screw all of this up more than anyone else.
Not that I'm saying this is not true but you have to consider the sheer control of the media in China, would we hear about the screw-ups, you can cover just about anything up with that level of control.
Anyway, Western companies tend to also cover up as much as they can, and China is not North Korea. And they do have safety protocols.
Think your Macbook Air is the best laptop you've ever used? That's made in China.
Not necessarily - it still may be (and is) that good quality bulk manufacturing in China is cheaper than equivalent-quality manufacturing in the West.
> With aircraft, we're talking a much higher level of competency than assembly lines.
Why assume that they don't have it? They've proven they have competency at manufacturing (the very device you typed your comment on is most likely a proof of that), they've proven they can run big projects, high-tech projects, etc. I'm in China right now; I look around and don't see people afraid of elevators or subways or the shitton of skyscrapers they're paving the ground with here. The big cities look just the same as big cities in every "developed" country - where exactly does this assumption of their incompetence come from? They're people just as we are, with engineering schools just like the ones we have.
Agreed.
> Western "Chinese = crap" stereotype seems to be because of Western companies, which pay for low-quality manufacturing.
Eh? If I go on eBay/Aliexpress and order some consumer good, the only worthwhile thing I'm going to receive is the amazement at seeing exactly how far they skimped. I doubt choosing a more expensive listing would yield a better result. Nevermind the many stories I've heard of Chinese manufacturing autonomously substituting different part numbers on a BOM, causing a run to be reworked or scrapped.
This indicates the culture of "good-enough" cheapness belongs to China itself. Yes, it is possible to pay more (meaning supervise more) for quality production in China - if it weren't, everything wouldn't be made there. But this seems like getting quality in spite of Chinese customs.
I agree about Aliexpress (but note that general wisdom is, you don't buy consumer electronics there - on the other hand, electronics components like sensors, ICs, etc. are of perfect quality there). But most people in the West don't buy on Aliexpress, nor do they even know it exists. The general population's experience with Chinese manufacturing is all the crappy products they buy locally, that have the iconic "made in China" phrase written somewhere. Here you can blame the actual western companies that ordered production of this stuff.
I attribute the popular refrain of "Chinese crap" to general simplemindedness bemoaning the state of the world. Your average person is not likely to focus on where a product is made when it works. Since everything is made in China, broken->"Made in China" is the association that gets made.
It's not like people aren't aware that it's the Western companies cheapening things, but they won't stop supporting them and the general unifying factor is still "China". Take something like Harbor Fright - it's clear that everything the store sells is "Chinese crap", yet they're still patronized by the people complaining the hardest. I think people just like to complain rather than act.
Cheaper is nearly always poorer quality wherever you go. China is certainly capable of extremely high quality work (iPhone!), it's just that they market on a low-cost basis instead.
Along with most of our electronic products - how do you reconcile that with your mom's anecdote?
What is so scary about planes being serviced/maintained at these locations as opposed to in the U.S.? Do they have factual data comparisons of maintenance issues at these sites including maintenance facilities in the U.S.? Or do we just assume that they're inferior and if the maintenance facility is in the U.S. there MUST be less of the issues described in the article and attributed to these remote facilities.
Is the article about the F.A.A. sucking at inspecting sites, and is that the fault of the airlines? Aeroman and other MRO's will all bend over backwards to keep airlines (and their regulators if required) happy with the work being done at their facilities, as it's great money and jobs for those areas. Maybe the article should be less scaremongering and more questioning about why the F.A.A. seems to suck so bad at their jobs (at least that's what I got out of the article, that's not my opinion at all).
All the statistical evidence points to air travel being safer than at any point in history but.... scary anecdotes and foreigners
They also explain that to be FAA certified, you must be able to read and comprehend English. This is because the maintenance books are all in English. Also of note, Southwest is one of the airlines that do this, and they are purely a domestic service.
This is less about xenophobia than FAA oversight. This is a real problem.
This does not, however, mean that anyone who is not FAA certified is unable to read and comprehend English.
This is an interesting point, but, have you got any data to sustain it?
I would expect that this is not their choice to make, but maybe I'm wrong. What are the FAA's rules with regard to major aircraft maintenance for US domestic airlines like Southwest?
Jets carry living people. Hard drives carry data. People's live require a higher standard of care than data. If the instruction manuals are written in English only then how can a non-English speaker possibly have read them?
I know that the prevailing opinion on this site is that all regulation is bad. However, for something like flying which is a matter of life and death regulation is literally a life saver.
NB I'm absolutely not implying that there is anything wrong with the maintenance. I'm implying that the US authorities would not know if there was.
It's not like they are making hard drives. Oh wait. Developing countries already do that.
Making airplanes is a bit more sensitive a matter than making hard drives. Do I need to explain why?
Last I checked, airplane RAID was in only exceptionally preliminary stages of development.
The point seemed to be that FAA don't really know who and how the planes are serviced and maintained. It's not a proposition of foreign work being inferior per se: it's just that FAA don't really know if the quality of work is high enough, and that it's expensive and resource-hungry to inspect foreign facilities, and that it's also impossible to do inspections without giving an advance warning.
Makes sense. But I wonder if they can't just state that only FAA certified maintenance that, further, has been regularly inspected by FAA staff is acceptable for US airliner fleets. If it's hard to inspect foreign facilities then let the airlines deal with the problem, by either bringing maintenance back to FAA soil or by paying for the FAA presence overseas.
The vast majority of this maintenance is probably level D heavy checks where you almost literally pull the plane apart and put it back together. However if they are doing non scheduled maintenance that means they are flying thousands of miles with tons of deferred (broken) maintenance items to whichever developing country is doing the fixin.
I would argue that reading and speaking English IS a big deal when your working on a plane that is labeled, placarded, has instrumentation, has maintenance manuals written in English. You know the last time you sat on a plane and there was a mechanic talking to the pilots and you are thinking "what the hell are we waiting for"? You were waiting for the maintenance logs to be completed and for the pilot to take a full inventory of any deferred item and how it changed the way he will be operating the plane today. The pilot was also probably talking to the mechanic who gave him the scoop on how many times so and so item has been written up recently or whatever other applicable info (it's in the logs, but it's nice when the mechanic can draw your attention to certain things). A gigantic part of the maintenance process is documentation and talking to the mechanics that fixed the problem.
PS: Also from personal experience I can tell that US does have significantly higher training and work standards than certain other countries when it comes to aviation. I immigrated to the US from overseas, am currently employed in aviation industry and hold a dozen of aviation certificates and ratings including those from FAA.
Plus there is a difference when South Korean maintenance personnel work on South Korean planes flow by South Korean crews, than just sending a US plane to the lowest contract bid in the developing world.
These places all have highly developed regulatory bodies that communicate with manufacturers and each other. Most happen to enforce English to ease communication on safety related issues.
I am going to say though flying is safer in the developed world. US based passenger airlines did not have one fatality since February 2009.
I don't see xenophobia in the article- I see "the logistics of inspection are now more complex." This also includes basic requirements such as drug testing and security screenings of employees.
In some of these countries, the war on drugs has left the governments in an uneasy place.
But behind that is that the FAA is severely underfunded. This is a fact.
"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."
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.
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.
"Dear Lord, we are flying in airplanes maintained by heathen savages in faraway nations? This is absolutely shocking, I demand changes now!"
Vanity Fair, of all places,for committing actual journalism
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.
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/globalpo...
http://qz.com/318534/despite-a-spike-in-deaths-2014-has-seen...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All the facilities used by airlines have appropriate regulation. That's why their aircraft are permitted to fly.
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.
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.
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."
Developed counties like the US were once low-tax, low-regulation outsourcing destinations with comparative advantages that outweighed even higher shipping costs.
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.
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.