Originally Posted by
AerialPerspective
And so what if it is... all this crap about 'offshoring'... I'm old enough to remember ALL of the MAJOR maintenance on 747-238Bs being done exclusively by United Air Lines in San Francisco for many years until the fleet grew to a point where it was economical to do it in Australia.
There's a certain degree of arrogance in the assumption that only Australian Engineers can do a good job, yet all the aircraft are built overseas... so you can't have it both ways. How is it that Qantas with a fleet of 75 737s can be the only option for repair??? Southwest operates nearly 800 737s, how could they possibly not be more expert in their maintenance.
It always amuses me, not trusting offshore maintenance when at least some of those countries build components for airliners.
Offshore maintenance "is always done to a price". In the late 1980's Qantas lost a lot of engineers because the Federal government wouldn't allow them to pay market rates (Accord). This meant that a number of B747's were sent overseas for heavy maintenance, the results were very poor so there was at least five different maintenance facilities used - most of them were major airlines. One was a United airlines facility at Oakland. I recall flying EBM after if returned from UA maintenance and we were delayed out of Sydney as the APU Bleed Air valve was U/S. Our engineers changed it and brought the dud part to the flight deck to show us. It was a dirty bronze colour (not the usual Aluminium alloy colour) and had no serial numbers on it. A cheap, non approved part had been fitted in place of the serviceable part that was there prior to maintenance. Our next question was how many other non standard parts were fitted to the aircraft we were about to fly.
The Dollar will always drive the quality of offshore maintenance - not the skill level.