Regionals Race to Recruit, Train Technicians

From Anchorage to Nashville maintenance executives are in a race against time. The issue is straightforward: growing fleets of turbine-powered aircraft coming on line, with just enough people to maintain them. For now.

Consider the chorus:

• “Recruitment, training, and retention of good A&Ps has “been a problem for three...going on four years now,” says Stephen Cotting, vice president of maintenance for Anchorage-based Ravn Alaska. He anticipates the problem will cripple industry colleagues “in the next two to three years.” Ravn will soon have an all Dash 8-100 fleet consisting of 10 aircraft.

• “It’s a very big challenge,” asserts Kevin Reinhalter, vice president of maintenance and engineering for PSA Airlines in Dayton. “We’re in this huge growth mode, so it’s becoming even more acute.” Acute indeed, considering that PSA is adding a trio of brand-new Bombardier CRJ-900s per month. The regional airline possessed 102 aircraft in early March 2016, a mixture of CRJ-900s, -700s, and -200s. By early 2018 plans are to grow the fleet to 150;

• The scramble to find good folks is exacerbated at Compass Airlines in Minneapolis, MN, by the fact mainline and cargo carriers are “doing a lot of hiring,” says Chief Operating Officer Jacob Rosholt. Compass is an all-Embraer outfit, operating six Embraer 170s and 56 Embraer 175s;

• “I agree with my colleagues,” says Robert Percy, managing director of Embraer Aircraft Maintenance Services in Nashville. “It’s a challenge … trying to find employees that match the values and behaviors we are looking for.” Embraer in Nashville produced 1.1-million billable man-hours in 2015, this via 11 lines of work.

Drilling Deeper

It’s not just the numbers of A&Ps that are needed, it’s the skills they bring to bear. PSA’s Reinhalter is looking for people who can troubleshoot, who can divorce themselves a bit from the dictates of on-board diagnostics and critically think the problem out. “The average maintenance technician I’m seeing today — even with experience — [has] marginal to poor trouble-shooting skills,” he contends.

Reinhalter doesn’t necessarily blame the technicians. In this increasingly plug ‘n play world we live in, he’s concerned built-in diagnostics of “very high-tech aircraft,” actually can contribute to poor trouble-shooting prowess.

Reinhalter presents a hypothetical: a technician replaces, in succession, a quartet of widgets from stock. All appear bad. When he goes to insert the fifth he discovers the circuit breaker was tripped all along. Reinhalter sees that sort of behavior, “more often than I would probably like to admit.”

Recruitment and Retention Tactics

Some impediments to entering the industry, such as pay and competing professions, are endemic. Others, like location, can come into play too. Stephen Cotting laments so strong is the demand for A&Ps that out of 10 A&P mechanics available for hire, only three of them are interested in moving to Alaska. After they do work in the remote environs they are often enticed to move back to the lower 48 states by other airlines “willing to pay moving costs and sign-on bonuses to recruit people.”

One way Ravn counters the call to head south is by going after those in love with the outdoors, the decidedly different pace Alaska offers. “The number of available guys and gals [who want to be aircraft mechanics] is not what it was 10 years ago,” says Bob Torrey, Ravn’s director of maintenance. “It takes a special kind of person who wants to become an A&P up here.”

Keeping homegrown A&Ps at home is helped along by schools such as Fairbank’s Hutchison Career Center. “Those trade schools are very important,” says Ravn Alaska Vice President of Marketing and Sales Michael Wien.

Down south, Embraer partners with a trio of local Nashville A&P schools. In some instances, Bob Percy says the State of Tennessee offers tuition assistance.

Some airlines and MROs want to take matters into their own hands. They’re either opening in-house training academies or looking at working with aspiring A&Ps in an apprenticeship capacity. “We’re talking with the FAA” about the latter says Embraer’s Percy.

PSA approached the problem by “ramping up” in-house training, training centered around its own academy. “We’ve spent a lot of money on it,” trying to bolster technicians’ troubleshooting skills says Reinhalter. With all those new aircraft to maintain, “we have to get them acclimated and activated very quickly to support our needs.”

Some carriers are tapping into social media to recruit technicians. “Just posting an opening is no longer enough,” says Compass’ Rosholt. In addition to cyber help, he says Compass tries to attract people the old-fashioned way — face-to-face. “Our best recruiters are often our employees,” he says. “Nothing is a more effective recruiting tool than a referral from a current employee who loves where they work.”

Workplace Innovations

Recruiting an A&P mechanic is one thing. Holding on to them is another. A safe, productive workplace can work wonders for retention.

At Embraer facilities globally, the umbrella Lean initiative is dubbed P3E — Embraer’s Enterprise Excellence Program. According to Alyssa Ten Eyck, a spokeswoman for the Brazilian airframe manufacturer, P3E “has proven to be an effective tool for overcoming obstacles.”

At Nashville, scrapping scads of paper and replacing it with tablet computers dramatically increased efficiency, cutting 24 hours off the time it takes between an inspector writing up a defect and an inspector beginning to work the problem. A process that used to consume a dozen steps now takes but six. To make this happen, Embraer employs new software. EmpowerMX FleetCycle® helps “transition us from the paper environment,” says Percy. The aim is to progressively increase up time for the customer assets. “They purchase the aircraft from Embraer to fly them, not to do maintenance,” he says.

High-cycle operations, the kind in which regionals specialize, exact a toll on the fleet. PSA’s highest-cycle aircraft, a CRJ-200, has racked up some 30,000 total cycles. Even the relatively new CRJ-900 fleet has a jet with 4,000 cycles. The PSA fleet as a whole is pretty typical of the kind of flying regionals do, accumulating — on average — six or seven cycles per day.

“If you can’t get long stage-lengths,” says Reinhalter, “your direct maintenance costs go up dramatically — engines, landing gear. One way to drive down those costs is to be as proactive about the care and feeding of your flying machines as possible. This is especially true in places where the operating environment is invigoratingly unforgiving."

Ravn’s Dash 8-100s average about seven cycles per day. The average stage length is approximately 50 minutes, and the terrain below can be breathtakingly inhospitable. That puts a heavier maintenance burden on operators. “The quality of the airplane has to be a little higher than [what] most people would call ‘the norm,’” says Vern Berry, Ravn’s director of quality control. “We don’t defer [maintenance items] as much. Because deferring things out in the bush is a bit problematic … not everyplace has a mechanic we can turn to.”

To execute that proactive approach Ravn’s fleet returns to the company’s Anchorage facilities every night to nest, enabling maintenance personnel to “get [in] a lot more touch time on the aircraft than many carriers,” says Berry.

As SMS systems proliferate, and good mechanics become harder to find, carriers and MROs increasingly see their technicians as assets — just as they do their aircraft. “Safety training has become a big money-saving innovation,” asserts Berry. Ravn, he says, instills the culture of care into its mechanics from Day One.

Fall protection is of prime importance. When Torrey started out with the company 20 years ago “there was no fall protection. We had incidents. We had accidents.” Nowadays, there’s little lost time from either.

That’s one of the most important retention tools of all.

For more information visit www.compassairline.com, psaairline.com, and www.flyravn.com.