Airframe and Powerplant

Once you're bitten, you're bitten for life

Every Friday around 10 a.m. Phil Kirkham and Bruce Hatch, co-owners of Coastal Valley Aviation in Santa Maria, California, fire up the barbecue. Their employees, and sometimes their wives, join in the get-together. The week-ending ritual is symbolic of the reasons these two maintenance professionals are working on small airplanes. They like small-town living, they like working a regular Monday-through-Friday workweek, and they enjoy the variety of tasks that general aviation maintenance provides.

Many small-airplane owners have discovered that good maintenance is hard to find. And more than one owner has kept mum when asked about the location and name of a good maintenance shop for fear that he might be crowded out of the shop's schedule.

There are two reasons for the dearth of good shops — many of the more experienced mechanics are leaving GA because of an increasing number of opportunities elsewhere, and the rising cost of doing business is cutting into an already slim profit margin. Despite these headaches, a number of mechanics tolerate these conditions simply because the rewards of working in GA outweigh the liabilities.

Little Flyers

This shortage of technicians is creating a new twist in customer relations — shops are forced to weed out customers who are difficult to work with, or who won't (or can't) keep their airplanes up to the shop's standards.

Little Flyers' established customers already know that owner Roger Stern and his staff (his wife, their son, and one technician) are in the business because of a passion for aviation maintenance. The challenge for many mechanics is how to keep that passion alive, yet still keep up financially. "We'd have to charge a shop rate of $100 an hour to compete with airline pay scales. I look for the [mechanics] that have the passion, because the others won't stay," Stern says.

Little Flyers has recently moved from Mesa to Kearny, Arizona, where more time can be spent fixing airplanes. "I used to have to set aside both Friday and Monday to take care of the unscheduled 'emergency' maintenance. Here in Kearny I still have plenty of work, but I left the Friday emergencies behind, so I'm not interrupted as much." Stern moved his whole shop so he would have more time to work. It's a passion.

Denise, the A&P

"I was a typical dairy farmer's granddaughter when my friend dragged me to an Air Force recruiter's office and I saw a video of the Thunderbirds. The airplane crew chief got their name painted on the airplane. I was 16, and I knew that's what I wanted." In 2000, Denise Nugent received the first James Rardon Student of the Year award from the Aviation Technician Education Council (ATEC). For more information on ATEC, see its Web site ( www.atec-amt.org).

Nugent's goal (her 10-year plan has been revised — she's on track to meet her objective in seven years) is to own an air taxi business. A Lockheed SR-71 technician in the Air Force, Nugent says that she has no plans to return to the dairy. "Once you're bitten, you're bitten for life. There's nothing like watching the SR-71 take off, especially after you've just rebuilt the engine."

The skills learned while pursuing an A&P certificate are in demand — and that's part of the problem. Amusement parks, office machine companies, automated manufacturing plants, and many other businesses actively recruit A&P school graduates. One A&P school administrator said he had read that less than 50 percent of the A&P graduates went into aviation. This is nothing new.

I received my A&P education at Northrop Institute of Technology in Inglewood, California, during a 13-month course and graduated in March 1971. Of the eight classmates in my dorm, only one other was still in aviation one year later — he had acquired his A&P certificate to complement his commercial pilot certificate. Keeping A&P graduates in the industry is not a new problem.

Technical world

Technically trained people are needed in every niche and corner of the world — whether the career path leads to a nonaviation job, the ownership of an aviation business, or the profession of aviation maintenance, there are few educations that open so many doors so quickly. Not everyone who graduates from A&P school has plans to work as a mechanic. For some, the A&P education is a step in a carefully planned career path.

"I want to go to work for the NTSB because I want to do investigations," says Kevin Barber. Barber, a 28-year-old student at Westwood College of Aviation Technology in Inglewood, California, has a bachelor's degree in business and has worked for the past nine years in the automotive field. "I got laid off last year and decided to go into aviation." Barber knows that the A&P certificate will open doors, and he plans to get his pilot ratings as he works toward his goal. Two of Barber's classmates indicated that their interests were more oriented toward compensation than passion, saying, "I think all the money is in the turbines" and "I'm interested in going where the money is."

A&P certificate

Holding an FAA airframe and powerplant mechanic certificate is a key to opportunity. After attending A&P schools for the requisite 1,900 hours, graduates can expect to be hired for aviation jobs with starting pay from $10 to $22 an hour, with the lower pay going to the general aviation crowd. Why would a graduate opt for GA when A&P skills are in demand in many industries? Because the passion that brought them into the field is most easily realized and maintained in GA.

Hatch used to work for a major airline in Los Angeles but tired of a seniority program that condemned him to always work the 8 p.m. to 4:30 a.m. swing shift — never was he able to spend a holiday with his family. After four years of the airline routine, Hatch joined with Kirkham and they opened their GA shop in a small town on the central coast of California.

Lindbergh's mechanic

In The Spirit of St. Louis, the classic book about his solo flight across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh wrote this about his mechanic, "His work is done, done with faithfulness and skill, now he stands there helplessly, intent, with tightened jaw, waiting for my signal. He feels responsible for the engine, for the plane, for me, even for the weather that holds the revolutions low."

In a few short sentences Lindbergh has captured the mindset of a professional aviation mechanic. He or she (approximately 10 percent of recent A&P school graduates are female) has been bitten by the aviation bug — they like the work they do, and feel a passion for the machines they work on. There's a payoff beyond the paycheck.

For those who find security in an orderly, well-structured work environment that's built around the technical-order world of written instructions and scientific cause and effect, the world of the A&Ps is comfortably predictable. The structure and tone of the industry, expressed in technical expressions such as foot-pounds, thousandths of an inch, and the linear cause and effect of professional troubleshooting, are stable and immutable. The machine is the variable, and devising methods for determining and maintaining its health is a fascinating and almost infinitely variable challenge. No two airplanes are the .ame. But this tech-nical side doesn't mean that the business leaves no room for creativity.

Creative work such as installing a modification kit; planning, cutting, and installing a new instrument panel; fabricating and riveting a sheet metal patch; or patching a damaged composite structure are just a few of the tasks that let A&Ps express their creativity. The variety of the work is one factor that always keeps GA work interesting.

Guidelines

The FAA has guidelines for aviation maintenance technician (AMT) schools in Advisory Circular 147-3, and lists FAA certified schools in AC147-2EE. A comprehensive list of approved schools can be found on the Web ( http://avinfo.faa.gov/maintenanceschool.asp). Further information related to the aviation maintenance industry is also available on the Professional Aviation Maintenance Association Web site ( www.pama.org), the Aircraft Maintenance Technology magazine Web site ( www.amtonline.com), and the Make It Fly Foundation Web site ( www.makeitfly.com).

A few schools can push out graduates in as little as 13 months, although most community college programs require two years. There are provisions to substitute military aviation maintenance experience or on-the-job training in place of the schoolwork. After the school hours or requisite alternative training requirements are fulfilled, each applicant has to pass three written tests (multiple choice), a practical test (demonstrating basic skills), and an oral test.

New learning

Ab initio (Latin meaning from the beginning) training is an intensive pilot-training process that prepares a nonpilot for professional pilot duties in a relatively short period of time. At the present time there is no such scheme being used for maintenance or avionics personnel. One program that is somewhat similar is an industry and school program recently started in California. Antelope Valley College, located near Edwards Air Force base in California's high desert, has recently entered into an association with SR Technics Palmdale. This Swiss company opened a heavy-jet repair station in Palmdale in late .999, and has form-ed a cooperating relationship with AVC.

Future plans include a voluntary work-study program in which students would work for SR on a part-time basis. In this way, SR Technics is assured a steady stream of well-educated, certificated A&P technicians (there are plans to tailor the program toward a heavy-jet Transport category curriculum), and AVC can attract more students and expand because of the quality of its program. The program has worked so well for AVC that a second class was just added in June.

Graduation

Today's graduates of A&P schools can choose from a number of jobs. The first February 2001 issue of Trade-A-Plane listed more than 100 A&P jobs in locales from the tropical islands of St. Croix to the Alaskan bush. A&P technicians and avionics technicians can work almost anywhere in the free world. Those with second-language skills have an even wider employment smorgasbord to choose from.

A recent salary survey by Aircraft Maintenance Technology magazine ( www.amtonline.com/content_salary.shtml) shows that the average general aviation mechanic's wage has dropped between 1997 and 1999. AMT interpreted this as evidence that experienced GA mechanics are leaving small airplanes behind to move to the higher pay and better benefits of corporate and air carrier jobs. It's also possible that the exodus of experienced A&Ps away from GA may have come about because of the recent insurance cost increases throughout the GA industry. Sometimes bill-paying practicality wins over heart-filling passion when all the pluses and minuses are weighed out.

The spark

"I always looked for the spark" when hiring employees, says Dan Daron, who is now the avionics program supervisor at Westwood College of Aviation Technology in Broomfield, Colorado. His test to determine whether a potential employee had the spark — push open the hangar door and watch; if they identified the make and model of every airplane in the hangar, or asked if it was all right to go take a closer look at the airplanes, Daron knew that he had a new employee. How does GA keep the mechanics with the spark? There will always be a percentage of mechanics who are drawn to GA. With new money flowing into the business, and the industry thriving as a whole, enrollments in schools are up. The airplanes have changed; modern A&P graduates know a lot less about dope and fabric and a lot more about composite repairs than my class did 30 years ago.

How can owners help these skilled people stay in business? Help your mechanic make some money on parts. Bringing in parts purchased at a wholesale house, and asking your mechanic to install them and sign off the installation is a practice that is singular to GA — and it cuts into your mechanic's already slim profit margin. Good GA mechanics are hard to find. Treating these craftsmen with respect will ensure that there will still be GA maintenance shops in business when your children and grandchildren begin to seek out an airworthy airplane for their first flying lesson.

E-mail the author at [email protected].