When Qantas grounded their fleet one of our claims was for this hangar to be built in Australia. Qantas claimed that they couldn’t afford the $100m to build it despite our quote for $27m to get it ready. Actually the Foxes who own Avalon airport would have built the hangar themselves and just rented it to Qf. This idea that they will make money from leasing the LAX hangar to make money is incorrect. Qantas have moved from their previous LAX hangar which they used every single day. They will not have any available slots to sell to other operators.
The real reason for this nice new shiny shed being built up North is labour costs and standards. I know this may sound weird but they actually want people working on planes who haven’t got any understanding of what they are looking at. Our LAMEs are airworthiness inspectors, much like a roadworthy inspector who issues you a green slip to sell your car. As the car owner, you want a hassle free inspector who will hand over the greenslip without telling you to replace the tyres and windscreen. That mentality has now embedded itself into Aviation management. They don’t want people there as airworthiness inspectors who can identify damaged or worn parts that need replacing. Management just want that airworthiness signature to go in so they can continue to make money. Of course this is a false economy because the problems just lay dormant and come out later when you least expect it.
This hangar has been built for 787 overnight checks called A checks. Now, every plane in the Qantas fleet has it’s A checks undertaken in Australia. Our blokes are competent, experienced and find things wrong before it is too late. This is not a response claiming that we are smarter than others, I am posting it as a factual review of the experience of a comparable workforce in Australia compared to Los Angeles. LAX has about 90 Engineers now and I’d compare it to maybe Sydney Domestic where there are similar numbers. Now I’d like to demonstrate the experience gap between the two.
SDT run with 4 DMMs (Foreman who are LAMEs), and 12 Senior LAMEs. There are 54 LAMEs and 18 unlicenced Engineers or AMEs. The LAMEs all average about 30 years each in the industry, nearly all at Qantas. The AMEs average at least 10 years each. There are 70 LAMEs and 18 AMEs or a ratio of 3.9 LAMEs to each AME. The total experience of this workforce is about 2,280 years in aviation.
LAX run with 4 Station Engineers (same and a Senior LAME), 18 LAMEs and 72 AMEs. I only know a few of the LAMEs but will assume they also have 30 years in the industry each. It was recently reported to me that the experience of the AMEs is roughly as follows. 24 of them have less than 3 months with Qantas and are mostly kids out of school who have to pass three exams about aircraft and then in the US, they are AMEs. Another 30 or so have between 1 and 2 years with Qantas. I will assume the rest, 10 years working on aircraft. There are 22 LAMEs and 72 AMEs or a ratio of .3 LAMEs to each AME. The total experience of this workforce is about 880 years or 1/3 the experience of a workforce of the same number in Australia.
In reality it works like this. An Australian AME with 10 years’ experience has nearly 4 LAMEs about them to make sure they are doing the job properly. An LAX AME could be straight out of school with less than 3 months experience on planes and the one LAME supervising him also has to supervise 2 other AMEs of minimal experience at the same time. A couple of weeks ago this hotch potch group completed a documented part A check of 400 hours work they claim to have done with only about 250 hours of available labour. The only possible explanation for this is that they rushed work and/or didn’t do it properly. Some of the fundamental errors coming out of LAX are astounding. Things like wires being crossed over on instruments and tooling being left around moving parts. The blokes in LAX were called in last year and told that the next one of them to make a mistake will lose their job. Living with threats like this only encourages these guys to hide their own errors or lose their income.
LAX for Qantas maintenance is a disaster waiting to happen.