Worldwide shortage of aircraft maintenance engineers: An opportunity for India, China?

London: Record aircraft orders during the past two years suggest air transport has never been healthier. Yet, despite this optimistic prospect, the question of who is going to maintain all these aircraft could stop airline growth in its tracks.
The shortage of aircraft maintenance engineers, technicians and mechanics is a problem worldwide; an exception is Gulf-based airlines. Being less cost-pressured than their cash-strapped competitors, Middle East carriers can offer skilled and experienced people top-flight salaries.
Adel Al Redha, Emirates Airline’s executive vice president engineering and operations, said his engineering department has not experienced an engineer shortage, but conceded that demand for skilled people (in the MRO industry) has increased significantly. To date, he said Emirates has been able to recruit all the licensed and experienced engineers it needs from other countries, and it also offers training to engineering graduates.
ST Aerospace COO Ho Yuen Sang conceded that his company had “lost a few people to Middle East companies” and had heard that the packages offered to these people appeared very attractive. However, he didn’t see large numbers of engineers leaving Singapore to move to jobs elsewhere because places like Singapore and Hong Kong work on a different financial level than other parts of Asia-Pacific.
In his opinion, the country most affected by skill migration is the Philippines.
The flow from poorer paid positions to higher paid ones is at the heart of the engineer shortage, according to Dave Marcontell, executive vice president and principal at industry consultants TeamSAI.
Despite demand, the current shortage has not driven wages up, he said.
“Over the past 10 years, airlines in the growth areas in Europe, Asia and India have had to hire a lot of people to keep that growth going, which likely accounts for the high average age of maintenance personnel. It’s therefore likely that the average age of maintenance personnel in companies that hired a lot of people is consequently lower,” Philippe Mhun, vice president A380 program, Airbus Customer Services said.
Given these ominous signs, OEMs and MROs have moved to address the skills shortage by getting closer to the students in technical colleges and universities and harnessing help from local authorities to develop technical skills.
“We cannot wait for graduates to knock on our door,” observed Bernhard Conrad, senior vice president design organization and innovation at Lufthansa Technik.
Rolls-Royce said it hires around 300 young graduates and apprentices each year to maintain the “life blood” of young skills in the company.
From its U.S. base, Boeing has relationships with universities worldwide and has increased that involvement over the past two years to get closer to the students and understand what they want.
So, with the technologies and materials to maintain in new generation aircraft, what kind of engineers will the MRO industry need?
Boeing’s Brunke believes new generation maintenance engineers will need to be high-caliber graduates with strong IT skills. They will need to understand computing and e-enablement, how computers link together, how the interfaces between hardware and software operate and how to discern the differences between software and hardware anomalies.
As the industry begins to increasingly depend on the higher-levels of education and training required to support more complex equipment, Marcontell believes airlines will find it harder to recruit and retain people of this level. By contrast, larger MROs with a large revenue base will be more likely to successfully hire and retain such people.
Supply and demand will be the biggest influence on industry stability, Marcontell said. Moreover, the industry has reached a point where it can no longer meet airline needs by hiring people straight from school.
India and China, he noted, have a lot of well-educated and well-trained professionals who are used to low (local) wages and who could easily fill the shortages in the West.
Now, costs are rising in those lower-cost areas, and, while the rise to parity won’t happen overnight, the Indian and Chinese economies inevitably will experience the same wage pressure issues suffered in the West. But wage parity in the industry will only occur when airlines worldwide are making reasonable profits.
06/03/08 Bill Burchell/Aviation Week, US