Originally Posted by empire4
You are an idiot if you think they pay $30/hr in places like Singapore or Malaysia. That is not how they make there money.
Singapore are effectively "buying" jobs by selling LAME time at USD35 per hour according to a couple of sources.
That's not just salary, that's with all on costs for employing people plus company overheads, supporting staff etc.
To break even in the Australian environment where on costs (without any company overhead) are approximately 30% then a LAME would be earning about 25 per hour.
There's no way that can be done and nor should it.
Problem is on a 100,000 hour check when you look at 15,000 LAME hours (assuming a 15% LAME requirement is a bit low at roughly 1 in 7 I admit but not too far off the mark) then on a straight wages component of even $100,000 per Australian LAME then you're looking at about $65 per hour (again, no overhead allocation, just straight up LAME cost) and that $30 differential translates to $450,000.
Just for LAME time.
That's what the industry is up against in this country, and whilst there is no excuse or reason for poor quality if any form of heavy maintenance is to survive in Australia we need to figure out how to do good quality checks in a more efficient manner.
You can bark at me all you like that the aviation industry has developed these processes over 100 years but unless we somehow find a way to really deliver value to the Australian aviation industry then only very minor checks and line activities will remain. It's that simple. I don't know what the answer is, doing what I do I see a large number of businesses in trouble, most of them go under. JHAS was one that I reckon could be saved, and aviation as an industry is one of the few I found really interesting and JHAS in particular holds something of an emotional grip on me (hence me sticking around this forum 5 years after I left JH). But for whatever reason it just hasn't worked as well as it perhaps could have. I'd love to know the reasons for it, and if nothing else it would give the current management team some kind of insight into what people are thinking. Equally it's not that easy to trust, I get that. But somebody has to give it a go, simple as that.