In The News: American Airlines may outsource more maintenance - Fort Worth Star Telegram

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Fort Worth Star Telegram

American Airlines may outsource more maintenance Fort Worth Star Telegram Some, like Southwest Airlines, send narrow-body aircraft to maintenance bases in El Salvador and Canada. "There is a broad and deep global marketplace for heavy maintenance work on wide-body airplanes," American CEO Tom Horton said during a meeting ... and more »

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[mrlupin]

The outsourcing of heavy maintenance is inevitable. With the airframes being so easy to move, the idea of flying to the location with the lowest bidder appeals to most operators. Other then costs, there is a huge advantage in liability. When you outsource to multiple MROs, you spread the risk around. Instead of having to manage your own repair organization and being liable for the product that comes out of that facility, airlines spread the risk and will simply drop the MROs whom do not perform at the appropriate levels. It's a way of externalizing risk. In the old days, corporations would have had to improve their maintenance processes and act preemptively to prevent problems. Now they will simply lay blame to the vendor and change to the next one.The other side of the story is likely to be a larger line maintenance department used to compensate for those "deals" ,that in some instances, end up costing allot of downtime while the aircraft is supposed to be in service.

In a short while, you will see that AC will have outsourced most of it's heavy maintenance. Semantically, the work is already outsourced to AVEOS . (AVEOS being the former AC entity) The AVEOS contract ends in 1213 and the airline is already soliciting bids from other vendors. A dramatic change is likely to occur at the end of that contract... In a way, all airlines are traveling down the same path. The Westjets of this world just got there faster because they started with clean sheet models.