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’...

The fact that airline operating expenses have recently risen is well published, and led by major factors such as fuel and labor which historically have accounted for the biggest portion of operating expenses. Closely on the heels of fuel and labor are the expenses for maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) of which the cost of parts, repairs, and overhaul have risen disproportionately compared to common economic indices such as Inflation and the Consumer Price Index. I wrote about this likely p...

It’s time once again to dive into the murky world of undefined terms with my professor’s hat properly donned. By undefined I mean the that the term is not clearly ensconced in regulations or standards. AS REMOVED: With the rise in popularity of aircraft and engines being disassembled to harvest parts for a supply-chain starved market, the use of the term ‘As Removed’ has come into effect, and this is really the genesis of the term. The moment the part is removed from its next higher assembly, it...

The latest overused term circulating among the media is “New Normal”. Everyone, in every field is looking for signs of what may emerge as post-pandemic patterns of behaviors, and particularly whether these behaviors are temporary or permanent – a new normal. This makes sense since long term adjustments in business models may have to be made, and so it is with airlines and their passengers (airline shorthand – pax) returning to flying. If you’ve done any amount of flying since the pandemic, it’s ...

International Airline Technical Pool (IATP) By Roy Resto It was a wintry, snowy, dark night at the airport (I know that sounds cheesy, but hey, it’s fun). Forebodingly, you have only one flight a day there and are minimally staffed and equipped. To your horror the flight skids and overruns the runway while landing. No one’s hurt and the damage to the aircraft appears minimal. After the FAA clears the scene, airport officials turn up the pressure to get the aircraft cleared of the runway, and the...