Heavy Maintenance?

[Birdman]

We at AA are being told continually by the compAAny and union that, "AA is the only airline performing their own heavy maintenance". Translation: reduce turn times significantly or the work will be outsourced. Can any employee of Delta confirm that you do absolutely no heavy maintenance on your own aircraft?

 

[DalMD88]

We are currently doing the last HMV's. We have a 757 and a MD88 still in dock. After these are done AC will be doing 767/757 and Avborne will be doing MD88/90. We will still be doing the PSV checks and Letter checks on everything here in ATL, but we have been told the PSV's our ours to loose.

The current rumor is the goals for the PSV's are unattanable and the will be gone by fall. Many of us think Ft Widget doesn't want anything to do with maintaining airplanes and will outsource all they can to show wallstreet they are doing something. Even if the savings are tiny.

 

[Birdman]

DalMD88, I'm not familiar with PSV and Letter checks. In Tulsa we do Heavy C, Light C, and drop in work on MD80's, 757's, and A300's. We're told we do the only 3 day light C's in the business. There's a big initiative to cut turn times almost in half on our heavy's (MD-80's) and it's going very well. There's been a lot of articles about Tulsa's big plans and we'll be featured in some maintenance magizine in the near future. Wall street will certainly be watching AA as well. BTW, from what I heard from one of our first docks to implement major improvements, management didn't show much interest in their method of improving turn times but they did it anyway and suceeded. Survival of our profession may be left up to us dispite management.

 

[DalMD88]

PSV checks are similar to your C Checks. They range from 3-5 days. Our MD88 don't get PSVs only a 14 hour letter check. Our latest rumor that was in todays paper. If conditions don't improve either the connection carriers or the Atlanta Maintenace Base might be sold.