OEM ANTI-COMPETITIVE, MONOPOLISTIC  PRACTICES IN THE AFTERMARKET? By Roy Resto   What’s going on in the aftermarket? I read an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Promised Monopoly Crackdown Fizzles.”1 The article highlighted the US Government’s acknowledgement that there needs to be more enforcement of laws against monopolistic practices. The aviation industry was not mentioned in the article, yet it triggered some thoughts: are there any such practices in the aviation industry? To the p...

What potentially, do all of the following have in common, which may occur in flight or while taxiing? A Pax dies of natural causes, lightning strikes, hale damage, bird strikes, FOD damage, hard landings, tail strikes, or bent metal caused by impacts with ground equipment or other aircraft. Answer: Depending on varying broad definitions, these, and many other scenarios all have the potential to be categorized as accidents or incidents. In fact it has been my experience that given a mature aircra...

As the title infers, this is part II. If you have not read Part I, please look back at the previous blog by the same title. The data which triggered my thought process was this graph, created by our friends at ICF International:   Let’s understand the basis for this data; from ICF: “Alternatives to new OEM parts are therefore a big deal. PMA parts are the best known, yet have achieved a modest 2% market share after decades of effort. A less glamorous, but fast-growing alternative is surp...

In college many of you took Micro and Macro Economics. You likely remember that those classes were characterized by the numbing number of graphs; recall those Supply-Demand curves? I liked those graphs. To a certain extent they were intuitive, and you could derive a great deal of information from them. I hope to do that with this blog. I have not seen these graphs before, so I’m having geeky fun expressing latent talents for academia. Recently, our friends at ICF International published econ...