There are 731 foreign repair shops certified by the F.A.A. around the globe. How qualified or the mechanics in these hundreds of places? It's very hard to check. In the past, when heavy maintenance was performed on United's planes had a huge hangar had San Francisco International Airport, a government inspector could easily drive a few minutes from an office in the Bay Area to make a surprise inspection. Today, that maintenance work is done in Beijing. The inspectors responsible for checking on how Chinese workers serve as airplanes are based in Los Angeles, 6,500 miles away.
Lack of proximity is only part of the problem. To inspect any foreign repair station, the F.A.A. first must obtain permission from the foreign government where the facility is located. Then, after a visa is granted, the U.S. must inform that government when the F.A.A. inspector will be coming. So much for the element of surprise—the very core of any inspection process. That inspections have had the heart torn out of them should come as no surprise. It is the pattern that has beset the regulation of drugs, food, and everything else.
What effect does all this offshoring have on the airworthiness of the fleet? No one gathers data systematically on this question—which is worrying in itself—but you don’t have to look far to find incidents in government documents and news reports to find incidents that bring your senses to an upright and locked position. In 2011, an Air France Airbus A340 that had undergone a major overhaul at a maintenance facility used by U.S. and European airlines in Xiamen, China, flew for five days with 30 screws missing from one of its wings. The plane traveled first to Paris and then to Boston, where mechanics discovered the problem. A year earlier, an Air France Boeing 747 that had undergone major maintenance at another Chinese facility was grounded after it was found that some of the plane’s exterior had been refinished with potentially flammable paint.
In 2013, yet another Air France aircraft, this one an Airbus A380 en route to Caracas from Paris, had to make an unscheduled landing in the Azores when all the toilets overflowed and two of the airplane’s high-frequency radios failed. The Air France pilots’ union said the incidents occurred on the airplane’s first commercial flight after heavy-maintenance work in China. The company that performed the work also does heavy maintenance for American. (Air France has denied that the problems were associated with maintenance done in China.)
In 2009, a US Airways Boeing 737 jet carrying passengers from Omaha to Phoenix had to make an emergency landing in Denver when a high-pitched whistling sound in the cabin signaled that the seal around the main cabin door had begun to fail. It was later discovered that mechanics at Aeroman’s El Salvador facility had installed a key component of the door backward. In another incident, Aeroman mechanics crossed wires that connect the cockpit gauges and the airplane’s engines, a potentially catastrophic error that, in the words of a 2012 Congressional Research Service report, “could cause a pilot to shut down the wrong engine if engine trouble was suspected.”
In 2007, a China Airlines Boeing 737 took off from Taiwan and landed in Okinawa only to catch fire and explode shortly after taxiing to a gate. Miraculously, all 165 people on board escaped without serious injury. Investigators later concluded that during maintenance work in Taiwan, a month before the flight, mechanics had failed to attach a washer to part of the right wing assembly, allowing a bolt to come loose and puncture a fuel tank. China airlines does maintenance work for about 20 other carriers.
Airline mechanics at U.S. airports who perform routine safety checks and maintenance tasks before an airplane takes off report that they are discovering slipshod work done by overseas repair shops. American Airlines mechanics contended in a lawsuit last January that they had been disciplined by management for reporting numerous safety violations they uncovered on airplanes that had recently been serviced in China. Mechanics in Dallas said they had discovered cracked engine pylons, defective doors, and expired oxygen canisters, damage that had simply been painted over, and missing equipment, among other violations. An American spokesperson denied the allegations, contending that the airline’s “maintenance programs, practices, procedures and overall compliance and safety are second to none.” Citing a lack of jurisdiction, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit. The F.A.A., however, is investigating the allegations.
With huge subsidies, the Chinese government has created an aircraft-maintenance industry almost from scratch—building hangars, hiring mechanics, and aggressively courting airlines to have work done in the People’s Republic . Even engine repairs and overhaul—the highly skilled aircraft-maintenance work that has remained largely in the U.S. and Europe—may follow heavy maintenance to the developing world. Emirates, the airline owned by the Gulf states, is constructing a $100 million state-of-the-art engine-repair-and-overhaul facility in Dubai that it claims will be “the most advanced facility in Dubai.”
Not everyone in official Washington is oblivious to what has been happening. The inspector general’s office of the Department of Transportation has repeatedly called for the F.A.A. to demand more stringent reporting requirements. It needs to know where maintenance work is being done, and by whom. In 2003, the inspector general called on the F. A. A. to require drug testing of workers at foreign repair stations as a condition of F. A. A. certification. Twelve years later, the agency still has no such requirement. Similarly, there are no mandatory security checks for workers at foreign airplane-repair stations. In 2007, workers on a Qantas jet undergoing heavy maintenance in Singapore were reportedly members of a work-release contingent from a nearby maximum-security prison, though the airline denied the allegation. (Despite frequent attempts, the F. A. A. did not respond to requests for information or comment on the issues raised in this story.)
In addition to sending work offshore, airlines are also outsourcing more maintenance work -- including heavy maintenance -- to private contractors in the U. S. Many of the issues that plagued the foreign shops -- unlicensed mechanics, workers who don't speak English, and poor workmanship -- are also present at some of these private American repair shops. The F. A. A. at least has the capability to inspect domestic facilities more frequently than it does those overseas.
The reality is that from now on it’s going to be up to the airlines to police themselves. With the F.A.A. starved for funds, it will be left up to the airlines to oversee the heavy maintenance of their aircraft. Have you noticed that this sort of arrangement never works? The F.A.A.’s flight-standards office in Singapore—the only field office it maintained in the entire developing world—once had half a dozen inspectors responsible for visiting more than 100 repair stations in Asia: not enough, to put it mildly, but they could accomplish something. By 2013 the number of inspectors was down to one. Now there is no one at all.
And I will confess that thinking about all this in the departure lounge puts the prospect of endless delay into perspective. Yes, I’ll happily wait a little longer to board my flight—and then hope for the best.
