In the Aviation/Aerospace industry, Manufacturers, Airlines, AMO/Repair Stations, and Distributors all conduct Receiving and Shipping Inspections of their aircraft parts. I have experience with all of these, so I thought I’d share some critical observations. First a little sarcastic humor from the distributor community: Salesman: “I meet my quotas by buying everything as quickly as I can issue PO’s. If it gets through my Receiving Inspectors it must be good…” Salesman: “I secretly drop ship ever...

Having worked for a major airline, the tragic memory of one of our aircraft crashing into the side of a mountain remains vivid. I was the senior QA member of management at the facility where this aircraft had all its major maintenance performed. I was off duty when the news broke. I called my on-duty staff and instructed them to sequester all the records for the aircraft in anticipation of the investigation review. As the sun rose the next day, the call came to hand these over. My thoughts immed...

Your customer has an urgent need for hard to find new Hi-Lok fasteners. You finally locate some New Surplus parts, but your source shares that the trace is to government military stock. Your customer’s Jurassic policy is that they will not accept any parts with trace to a government/military source period, so their aircraft languishes for lack of parts, and they will pay a lot more waiting for the commercial sources to get stock. Is this policy in the best interest of their fleet and budget? We’...