What a horrible article. This article starts with the assumption American=Good/Foreign=Bad. Complete with a scaremongering title.<p>"repair shops thousands of miles away, in developing countries, where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English."<p>Because developing countries are worse at this? Jets are designed to be maintained. It's systematic work. "Take this cowling off. Unscrew that, check this. Replace that." It's not like they are making hard drives. Oh wait. Developing countries already do that.<p>"But the F.A.A. no longer has the money or the manpower to do this." Wait... That sounds like the gist of the article. "FAA underfunded and unable to check check maintenance facilities"<p>Vanity Fair carries on with some more scaremongering:<p>"There are 731 foreign repair shops certified by the F.A.A. around the globe. How qualified are the mechanics in these hundreds of places? It’s very hard to check."<p>I usually like reading Vanity Fair articles. But this one got my "It's not American" xenophobia hackles up.
The other day this anecdote was going around on metafilter, the "DC 2 1/2": <a href="http://www.cnac.org/aircraft02.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnac.org/aircraft02.htm</a> where for wartime expediency reasons a DC-2 was fitted and flown with a DC-3 wing on one side, which was about 5 feet shorter. The article contains this sentence:<p><i>"Disaster was close, too close; the mechanics mated the wing, bolts went in, the two butted nicely, they called me to tell me the bottom would not pull up butt to butt, although all bolts went through. Upon inspection, I found that Douglas inspecotors failed to see that the bottom wing bulb angles were not properly trimmed, thus the gap. I complimented our Chinese mechanics. Men of lesser experience might have tried to pull the angles together and a fatal crash would have followed. Douglas was advised via Andy Priester. I cannot praise our Chinese mechanics enough. Once trained and well led, they could be compared to the very best."</i>
Hey, that's good. I mean, if those countries are "developing countries", not just "underdeveloped countries". So we avoid the usual tone where "developing" actually means "not developed and never going to develop".<p>70 years ago hardly anyone was thinking that they'd drive a car made by a Japanese company. 30 years ago hardly anyone was thinking they'd do their daily correspondence through a smartphone that was manufactured in China. 20 years from now hardly anyone will think twice about flying in a plane whose regular maintenance is done in Mexico, China, Romania, Estonia or whatever -- and possibly even designed and made in China. (After all, 25 years ago not that many were thinking that the British Airways plane they flew was actually maintained by cheaper labour from Finland, and today we fly in planes made in Brazil, which many also call a "developing country".).<p>But this article... cheap xenophobic fearmongering.
Most comments on here regarding xenophobia etc seem to be missing the overall point of this article.<p>The real issue is that these companies and individuals cannot be held accountable by the FAA. Usually every single item of work can only be officially signed off (which makes you legally responsible for it) by somebody the regulator considers qualified to do so. If it later turns out that that particular job was done incorrectly a paper trail follows directly to the individual(s) responsible. Not surprisingly this kind of accountability makes your average engineer very diligent.<p>If you have a lot of engineers that are not accredited and so cannot legally approve work (someone comes in and rubber-stamps everything), or are based in a country with a sketchy legal system you're gonna have a bad time upholding standards, regardless of how "good" the engineers are and the quality of their English. It would be xenophobic if the FAA was freaking out about work done in Europe, Canada, Australia etc too - but it isn't.
I can't speak for every one of the facilities mentioned in the article, but for one of the airlines mentioned that has work done in the Aeroman facility in El Salvador, the airline staffs American F.A.A. certified mechanics with decades of experience to oversee the operations performed at the facility.
Whether or not the maintenance is any good, as a passenger the best airline I've flown with in terms of apparent maintenance (i.e. everything looks like it works) and cleanliness is Emirates. I flew with BA a couple of months ago (in business) and the aircraft were filthy and very old.
I usually read VF and New Yorker articles pretending to be an aristocratic American from a century ago:<p>"Dear Lord, we are flying in airplanes maintained by heathen savages in faraway nations? This is absolutely shocking, I demand changes now!"
Although somewhat alarming on the face of it, it's hard for the untrained observer to say whether this merits deep systemic concern or whether it's largely more scaremongering about things being done in foreign places.<p>1. The article cites numerous examples of problems in recent years that have been attributed somehow to improper maintenance in developing world facilities, but doesn't discuss the statistical or historical incidence of maintenance errors for domestic aircraft maintenance and overhauls.<p>Could it be that these problems, however sensational they sound when juxtaposed with China or El Salvador, have always been with us? At roughly the same rate?<p>2. Despite the fact that this trend has been seemingly ongoing for more than a decade now, recent statistics suggest that the last decade has been unprecedentedly safe in the history of aviation:<p><a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/27/globalpost-flying-safe/70534422/" rel="nofollow">http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/27/globalpo...</a><p><a href="http://qz.com/318534/despite-a-spike-in-deaths-2014-has-seen-the-fewest-plane-crashes-in-the-modern-aviation-era/" rel="nofollow">http://qz.com/318534/despite-a-spike-in-deaths-2014-has-seen...</a><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safest-year-for-airlines-globally-since-1945.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/business/2012-was-the-safe...</a><p>Of course, it's possible we are the beneficiaries of uncannily favourable coincidences, but the point is, there's an explanatory burden in why, if offshore maintenance were truly the problem the article insinuates it is, it doesn't make a more pronounced actuarial mark.<p>3. Despite the sensation that discussions of flight safety evoke (due perhaps to our sense of its innate precariousness, at some instinctual level), it may well be that airplanes are by far not the most quantitatively-statistically significant thing built or maintained in the developing world to which we entrust our safety.<p>Except for those with a preternatural knack for somehow avoiding travel by automobile, we have, do, and will again entrust our lives on a daily basis to assembly code written by Japanese, Korean, and probably Chinese programmers. A great deal of manufactured products, industrial materials, and other artifacts of modernity are manufactured in the developing world. If this alone were truly a life-and-limb disaster in the making, as the article implies, one would think it would be reflected in widespread mortality of all sorts, everywhere.
Perhaps the airlines should start outsourcing to Cuba.<p>Cuban mecánicos are world renown for their bang-up work keeping old-timey Detroit built 30s-40s-50s era cars on the road for years.
From a Boeing Senior Manager:<p>Actual, with the volume of airplanes sold to non-domestic carriers the need to have foreign companies maintain them is very important. It is important that the global capability to fix/repair and maintain the airplanes grows with the demand in order to assure safe reliable flight. The world is full of MRO’s, (maintenance repair and overhaul) centers for many years. So this is not new.
I've noticed this- even Manila is increasingly a location for this sort of maintenance work.<p>I think there should be a place where we as customers can easily see where carriers we may be considering are maintaining their planes and if they have appropriate regulation and oversight for that work.
The greatest economic mystery of the last 50 years is "why is everything so cheap in developing countries?". It's surprising that more people aren't fascinated by this mystery.<p>Why is it so cheap for workers at this plant to obtain a vocational education and support themselves? Why is it so cheap to operate the plant? What is the ultimate cost driver in developed countries that makes everything so much more expensive?<p>What's odd is that some developing countries, like Angola, are absurdly expensive.
I hate to see these jobs go overseas, but that's the high cost of over regulation.<p>This article's main example is of a maintenance problem with a foreign aircraft maintained and flown outside the US. It's unclear what the FAA could do about that.<p>Also, the article cites incidents, but has no evidence as to whether this is better or worse than the previous heavily regulated and unionized system.<p>I can cite my own anecdotes passed on to me by family members who were commercial pilots in the US about shoddy maintenance by US mechanics, and how these problems seemed to mysteriously spike when a new labor contract was on the table.<p>If there's a real problem here, too bad the article doesn't get to it.