Are offshore aircraft-repair stations a safety risk to passengers and crew?

Somewhere on the ground in São Paulo, Brazil, an aircraft technician needed help. He was a man of about 40, posting a friendly inquiry onto LinkedIn this year with pictures of a metal sphere he didn’t recognize deep inside an American Airlines jet. He had no idea what it was.

“Hi everyone. This component is located on the Engine Rolls Royce Trent 800,” wrote the mechanic, in broken English, smiling in his profile picture next to an AA passenger plane. “Does someone could give me a technical information…? What is the function of that component ….? I searched long about it, and I did not find…”

This earnest message, sent by a technician proudly identifying himself as an American Airlines employee in Brazil, was received with alarm by his colleagues in the United States. If this foreign worker was unable to even identify the equipment in front of him, located on a Boeing 777 jet, how was he supposed to fix it?

It was more evidence of risks to passengers and crew as domestic air carriers increasingly use offshore repair centers in South America and Asia, where standards can be lower in crucial areas of safety, training and worker competence. Crowd-sourcing technical knowledge falls far short of what is required to keep these exceedingly complicated airplanes flying safely.

“It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” John Samuelsen, president of the 150,000-member Transport Workers Union, told Capital & Main.

In 2003, according to TWU, only seven percent of repair work was being done overseas. Now it is 30 percent. There are more than 900 foreign repair stations currently certified by the Federal Aviation Administration-including a new $100 million aircraft maintenance facility in São Paulo. American Airlines alone employs about 400 technicians on foreign soil.

“In South America or in China, the workers that they hire are not required to go through the same rigorous testing and certification,” said Samuelsen. “No criminal background checks, no random drug testing, no certification requirements that exist with the airline carriers in America.”

Samuelsen provided Capital & Main with TWU photographs, reports and emails that document instances of what he described as unsound repairs, faulty wiring and other stopgap measures that would never be allowed at a U.S. facility. According to a 2018 memo from TWU vice-president Gary Peterson, a Boeing 787 with a cracked high-pressure duct was serviced in Chile, then arrived in Chicago with the duct held together by tape and wire.

“This is a high-pressure duct that operates a valve critical for the safety of engine operations, which could have caused a catastrophic in-flight event,” the TWU email warned. “This type of item is no longer the exception but more the norm.”

A 2018 report prepared for TWU by the risk management firm Ridge Global (led by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge) found that offshore repair stations regularly fall short of U.S. standards on “levels of oversight, cultural views of safety and security, staffing practices and issuance and possession of FAA certifications for mechanics and technicians.” Budget constraints also limit the number of overseas inspections conducted by the FAA.

At the July 17 House aviation subcommittee hearing on safety in air travel, Capt. Joe DePete, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, said: “Whenever we’ve had an aircraft come back from a foreign maintenance station, we’re always taking a good look. … They typically go to the lowest bidder, and I’ve always said this: Skilled labor’s not cheap, cheap labor’s not skilled. And you end up getting what you pay for.”

A new sense of urgency is pushing the airline safety issue in the aftermath of two crashes of Boeing 737 Max passenger jets in 2018 and 2019, killing more than 300 passengers and crew. The first panel of witnesses to address the committee were family members of those killed in the crashes, including Paul Njoroge, who lost his wife, children and mother-in-law.

The day before the hearing, Boeing released another statement of apology and committed to “help with the healing process,” but Njoroge noted that while the company “apologized to the families in front of cameras,” the family members in need of healing had yet to hear those regrets in person.

A serious congressional response may be required as pressures increase at carriers to avoid drawing attention to the lapses. Rather than address safety issues, technicians have been warned “if they write up aircraft, the work will be moved outside the U.S. and the TWU stations will be nothing more than gas and gos,” according to an email circulated to union reps from TWU’s Peterson. capitalandmain.com