Airlines and Repair Stations

The media is starting on one of their favorite crusades, the Airline Safety Crusade again. Every few years they seem to go off about something having to do with airline safety. This time we're back to one of their old standbys - the repair stations.

Repair stations are basically contracted repair facilities. They can usually do most of repairs at a lower cost than the airlines, as they aren't subject to the same union rules. They do however, have to complete the repairs to the same standards as the airlines would be held to.

In theory there should be no difference in quality between an airline doing its own maintenance or a contractor doing it for them. In practice, there really is little to no difference. So why the big stink in the media about repair stations?

It mainly has to do with misconceptions. One of the biggest problems facing the airline industry over the last few years has been that of undocumented parts. Basically these are parts where the required FAA paper trail is incomplete. Sometimes the parts are undocumented, but quality rebuilds. Other times they are parts that should be taken out of services. Either way they usually they cost substantially less than documented parts.

The media likes to portray undocumented parts as a problem unique to repair stations. But it's not. During the last big sweep for bad parts, the major airlines were finding substantial quantities of them in their inventories too.

Now undocumented parts weren't the issue in this case. This time it was a trainee and his supervisor skipping 12 steps in a maintenance manual. Surely this wouldn't have happened at a major airline in the in-house repair facilities, right?

Don't bet on that. Airline mechanics are just as likely to skip steps as repair station mechanics. If anything, the guy at Joe's Fleet Maintenance is probably going to do more repair work than any airline line mechanic.

Now I'm not condoning the trainee and his supervisor for skipping 12 steps, if that's what they did. There is no acceptable excuse for that kind of inaction.

Just don't let the media hype affect you. An airplane repaired at a repair station is every bit as safe as one fixed at an airlines base. If there is a problem with a lack of oversight, it is industry wide.

That should be the scariest fact in this case.