Originally Posted by
WHBM
The same. Um … this is aviation engineering, not a burger flipping joint. Look at the difficulty Boeing have had at Charleston with a new workforce compared to Seattle. And these people will need the right licences to work on the aircraft. There aren't many who have Max licences around at the moment, and certainly, of those few, who want to go and live in a company-supplied (always the worst) trailer in inland Washington through the winter. And who can see Mr Cost-Conscious at Boeing, possibly the same one who outsourced the MCAS programming to the low bidder, offering unresistable salaries. No, quotes from "MBAs for Dummies" about "Economic Theory says …" are what got HQ at Chicago into much of this from the start.
Just as a point of clarification, a person does not have to be licensed to work on any aircraft. Rather, the work itself must be signed off by someone with the required license. A bothersome trend in commercial aviation for the last decade or so has been the increased outsourcing of maintenance to "lower cost" vendors. These vendors achieve much of their lower costs by employing unlicensed technicians, and the results have been predictable. Lost in much of the news of the MAX groundings, over at American Airlines something like 25 of their 737-800s were temporarily grounded a few months back because of substandard work related to their new "Oasis" configuration. All of these aircraft had been modified by a third-party vendor using unlicensed personnel to accomplish most of the hands on work.
As far as the actual modifications required to reconfigure the MAX's, as far as I am hearing it will only involve new software/firmware in the FCC's. This may just be a software upload or at most swapping out circuit boards followed by some kind of verification checks. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of labor hours will be sucked up in the tasks related to taking the aircraft out of storage. It is not simply a matter of starting up the engines and taxiing away. The longer these planes sit, the more time that will be required to return them to flight status.