AA RIN
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<_< -----Beautiful iceman! A link to subscribe to the Tulsa World! Just what we all need!!!??? 😉
PRINCESS KIDAGAKASH
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If the TWU had a scope clause in it's contract,maybe we wouldn't have worry about outsourcing. Would we?
AA shop here lands 777 work
By D.R. STEWART World Staff Writer
4/27/2006
View in Print (PDF) Format
The jet maintenance contract solidifies 18 jobs over three shifts.
American Airlines' Tulsa Maintenance & Engineering Center will begin overhauling landing gears on the carrier's 45 Boeing 777 aircraft this fall after winning competitive bidding against outside vendors, company executives said Wednesday.
The 777 landing gear work will not expand employment at the M&E Center, but it solidifies 18 jobs over three daily shifts in the base's Landing Gear Shop, said Carmine Romano, American's vice president of Tulsa Base Maintenance.
"Today, we do landing gears for (American's) MD80s, Boeing 767s, Airbus A300s and 737s," Romano said in a telephone interview, "and we just landed the 777 work. We put out (requests for) bids to vendors and our own shops six months ago. Our shops won the bid last week because of faster turn times, because of our (parts) inventory and our capabilities of plating, making parts and repairing parts."
Romano said the base's continuous improvement processes have been adopted by the Landing Gear Shop, which has improved cycle times of repairs and overhauls, reduced parts inventories and increased capacity.
"This is a prime example of how the working-together process involving our employees in continuing
to look at ways of reducing costs leads us to becoming a world class maintenance facility," Romano said.
Dennis Burchette, president of Local 514 of the Transport Workers Union, said winning the 777 landing gear work took a collaborative effort.
"Getting this work brought in-house took a total team effort and a lot of hard work on everyone's part," Burchette said.
American executives estimated that the M&E Center's bid for overhauling the 3,000-pound main landing gear and the 800-pound nose gear was 20 percent below that of outside maintenance, repair and overhaul organizations. Landing gear overhauls are conducted after about 10 years and take about 45 days, they said.
The 777 landing gear overhauls will be the first completed on American's 777 fleet, officials said.
In the U.S. airline industry, which has lost more than $42 billion in the last five years, American is the only network carrier performing in-house aircraft maintenance and overhaul work.
Across the M&E Center over the past two years, joint teams of management and labor have brainstormed for ways to increase efficiencies and drive down costs.
For the first time at a major carrier, the company has allowed representatives of TWU Local 514, who were compelled to sign confidentiality agreements, to examine company financial statements in order to fully understand the company's position.
American's executives and mechanics realized a new approach was needed after American nearly filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003. The world's largest airline ended up laying off thousands of workers, including 700 of the M&E Center's 6,000 mechanics, and won $1.8 billion in wage and benefit concessions from unionized mechanics, pilots and flight attendants.
In 2005, American executives announced a goal of turning the M&E Center, the world's largest aircraft maintenance base, from a cost center to a profit center. Their goal was to win $500 million in third-party maintenance work or cost savings by the end of 2006.
Romano said the airline is halfway to its goal.
"We're at $198 million right now, not counting the 777 work, which will start in September or October," Romano said. "Counting the third-party work we have already signed up, we're closer to $250 million."
So they are now admitting that they have never looked at the company's books ever before, makes sense when looking at our contracts.
So what they are saying is that we are more capable of doing the work, because we already have the tooling, and with the labor being free, we are cheaper.
Uhh, the Tulsa World reporter may not have accurately reported the story - which wouldn't be surprising, considering this gem in the story:
The only network carrier performing in-house maintenance? Perhaps the only one with in-house heavy airframe overhaul, but that's not what the cub reporter wrote.
Im curious about this one:
AA's first 777 has only been flying for seven years, not ten, so if ten years is accurate for landing gear overhauls, how come the first 777 gear overhaul begins this fall?
As is very typical, if I didn't already know that AA has a maintenance base at Tulsa, I'm not sure I'd believe any part of this story (including the existence of the TULE base). 😀
