Educational Alliances

Educational Alliances

Two aviation maintenance managers partner with technical colleges to address the technician shortage

BY Monica L. Rausch, Associate Editor

June 1999

They are plastered throughout newspapers and trade publications and on the bulletin boards of technical colleges: job notices for aviation maintenance technicians and craftsmen. With growth in the aviation industry comes some growing pains, which maintenance managers are experiencing. The work is there, but the workers aren't.

"The good news is that technical schools across the country are responding in various degrees to this demand (for technicians/craftsmen)," says Kurt Herwald, president of Stevens Aviation.

Stevens employs some 350 technicians and craftsmen at various facilities in Greenville, SC; Lexington, KY; Dayton, OH; Nashville, TN; and Denver, CO.

Stevens, as well as Midcoast Aviation, which employs 473 technicians and craftsmen at three locations in Little Rock, AK, and St. Louis, MO, are teaming up with technical schools to build a future supply of employees.

We talked to Herwald and Gary Driggers, vice president and chief officer of operations for Midcoast Aviation, about these new partnerships and about the factors that may have caused this current dearth in technicians and tradesmen.

A Multitude of Causes
The technician shortage became acute for both managers in the last two years. "In '97 it really started reaching epidemic proportions," notes Herwald.

"You started seeing the airlines start extensive campaigns in trying to hire away technicians, mostly from general aviation." He says Stevens took its business out of Atlanta, GA, because the strong air carrier presence there drained their supply of technicians.

However, Herwald says hiring by the airlines isn't the only factor that's making technicians scarce. Aircraft manufacturers are raiding the slimming ranks of technicians to hire them on the manufacturing side.

Competition is also coming from outside the aviation industry. Maintenance managers are finding that they have to compete with industries such as car manufacturing and the computer industry. Herwald reports that when BMW opened a plant in Greenville, an estimated one-third of his technicians interviewed for supervisory positions.

"They were going to hire them as supervisors, figuring, I guess, that their aviation background would certainly have instilled a culture of quality and attention to detail. They're absolutely right, unfortunately," he notes.

Avionics repairmen are especially hard to find, he says, since the computer industry often woos them away. "There are minimal schools that actually train avionics repairmen, and the ones that do ÉYou're always hearing all these anecdotes about how the whole class was hired by a computer repair company," says Herwald. "And the money that the telecommunications and computer industry can offer these people is really greater than what this industry can realistically afford to pay, given the prevailing rates in the market."

While all this is happening, many of today's technicians are reaching retirement age, adds Herwald, since a bulk of them came out of the military in the 1960s during and after the Viet Nam War.

Going to the source
At first, both Stevens and Midcoast responded to the technician shortage by "stealing" technicians from their competition, say Driggers and Herwald. "That's really not solving the problem," notes Driggers. "It's just shifting the problem around."

Adds Herwald, "In the long run, that's destructive to the industry, and in the short run, if they were willing to move from Texas to here for three (more) bucks an hour, you can bet they're willing to move to Seattle for another three bucks an hour."

Driggers realized that a strong economy and a booming aviation industry meant that hiring practices couldn't continue as normal. "There was going to be a continuing need that we couldn't fill in any capacity based on the way we've been doing business up to this point in time."