Morning All
As per a previous post this is an almost dead thread that I stumbled across but for what it's worth will throw my hat into the ring. I do not intend to malign any particular company as I believe this industry is too small for stone throwing.
I've had the dubious pleasure of working with GAMCO and SRT BAH and alongside GF engineers. Without doubt all three companies has good engineers working within them that I respect highly. Likewise all three companies lets it's staff down. Particularly true of SRT when I was with them.
Whilst SRT has it's faults, from my time with them, I cannot see how they can be blamed for the condition of the GF fleet. For sure logistics, lack of ground equipment etc were big problems but they inherited a fleet in real need of some TLC.
It would have been easy to ground many of the fleet as they rolled in the hangar - particularly the 767s. The challenge was to keep them going without jumping into grey areas. Unfortunately this was the legacy of GAMCO and it cannot be disputed. One of the reasons ADDs climbed.
The question is why was the fleet like this when the individual engineers in AUH know their stuff? That's for another forum except as previous folks have pointed out there are huge cultural pressures in the region, lack of oversight by strong tech reps, fear for one's job, easier to turn a blind eye, possibly incorrect maint schedules, bad LAEs and techs mixed in with the good and some very ingrained bad practices at GAMCO, etc etc.
What was SRT's biggest mistake? Probably not carrying out good a/c surveys prior to signing on the dotted line. Followed by thinking they could run BAH as if in ZRH - getting rid of 75% of the European techs in one go and bringing in guys from the Far East at the same time didn't help either.
No I'm not having a pop at cheap labour but a handover period would have been good. Did somone say Human Factors??
The guys and gals in SRT BAH have shed loads of experience in many parts of the world - the shame is SRT didn't allow them to use it.
Nuff said