Piper,
Here's one for you.............
Unwillingness of young people world-wide to enter a career in aircraft maintenance, and the consequent skewed age profile of the maintenance licensed workforce, meaning that as the older guys fall out of the tree there are insufficient younger people to replace them.
Much less maintenance per flight hour is a feature of newer aircraft, however there is a continuing huge increase in flight hours globally, resulting in a net increase in demand for maintenance manhours which cannot be met by the global workforce.
The principal reason is that as revenues per flight hour are driven down and down by the locos, there is only one cost which can be driven down by the airlines (in the short term) and that's maintenance labour. So pay rates are pathetic and therefore do not attract enough new entrants.
Other significant costs such as fuel, aircraft leasing, crew pay, airport charges, maintenance parts and materials, insurance etc are largely out of the airlines' control and are increasing. Costs in their control like administration, reservations and sales, and marketing are all cut down to the bone already.
And yet the industry continues with the folly of reducing its revenue per flight hour to absurd levels, hoping, presumably, that customers won't realise what's being cut so that they can fly 500 miles for 25 Euros, or whatever.
Big airline maintenance organisations, and large independant ones, have stopped in many cases providing good ab-initio training to develop their own workforces due to the costs involved, and rely on recruiting qualified staff when needed from smaller companies, and on using contractors.
This works, but it is unsustainable in the medium-long run (5-10 years) as the workforce shrinks, and as relatively inexperienced people rise to the top too quickly.
Unless the airline industry recognises the folly of its lack of thought over this issue, and meets the challenge it presents squarely and forcefully, its continued growth is threatened.
The short-term solution is to cut corners, reduce the qualification requirements for engineers, and to put off major maintenance, and these measures are in effect being adopted now, because they also provide a delusion of reducing costs.
In the traditional way, it may need a major fatal accident of a European or US aircraft, in Europe or the USA, and caused partly or wholly by a failure to carry out maintenance properly, to shift the industry and its regulators out of its complacency.
I wonder what your charter carrier will think about that? There have been several incidents in the past 24 months loosely attributable to saving money on maintenance , at least one fatal, but none big enough to stir the movers and shakers out of their afternoon naps.
Good luck with the essay.