MRO Faces Skills Gap As Recruiting Efforts Surge

Boeing issued a warning last summer that “juniority across the workforce” would be a significant obstacle for MRO suppliers over the following two decades, and now U.S. providers of aviation maintenance are echoing these worries.

Senior executives at numerous MROs and airlines highlighted that the skills gap, which has been compounded by retirements of the industry’s aging staff, is increasingly posing problems during a workforce discussion at Aviation Week’s recent MRO Americas conference in Atlanta. Even while the MRO sector is awash in programs to recruit and retain new technicians, the loss of individuals with senior-level expertise and experience is stressing out maintenance providers.

“It’s not just the number of [technicians]—it’s the skill level,” said Trey Bryson, senior vice president of operations at ATS. “In MRO there are healthy ratios of higher skill to lower-skilled people, and that literally affects the efficacy of what we do and the services that we provide. It is a pure numbers problem. The focus is having the right number of people on the higher end that are more skilled, provide oversight and do certain parts of the check where that skill level is important. It’s kind of a two-headed monster.”

There is an increasing requirement to dispatch more high level workers off-site to monitor at Atlas Air, which outsources much of its maintenance work to outside companies. The needs of the airline were met by two relatively junior-level specialists who were provided by a maintenance vendor, according to Lillian Dukes, senior vice president of technical operations at Atlas Air. “I believe they held their A&P licenses for a total of 60 days. That worries me, ” Dukes added. We began examining what needs to be done to strengthen oversight, reduce these kinds of problems, and other things of that nature.

The independent MRO saw substantial attrition last year, according to Bill Collins, president of HAECO Americas, a problem that keeps him up at night. “Consider recruiting 500 technicians while firing 80 of them. Imagine your skill set, which is currently 55 years old on average with 25 years of experience, plummeting to 45 years old almost immediately, Collins continued. Although a skills gap between a 45-year-old and a 55-year-old might not be expected, he pointed out that several years of experience make a big impact. “You start to see safety issues, you start to see damage to aircraft throughput activity, and you start to see not enough of the right kinds of supervision to manage it.”