WASHINGTON (AFP) — The nine major US airlines are increasingly using outside contractors to perform maintenance work, making the Federal Aviation Authority's (FAA) oversight duties more difficult, a government report said this week.
The trend has seen airlines more than double the amount of repairs the outsource over four years, increasing the major work they outsource to 71 percent of all maintenance work in 2007, up from 34 percent in 2003.
The report from the Transportation Department's inspector general also found that safety oversight of the airlines' maintenance work needs improvement.
While steps have been taken to improve oversight, the FAA "still faces challenges in determining where the most critical maintenance occurs and ensuring sufficient oversight," said investigators.
The FAA relies heavily on the airlines' own oversight, but investigators reported that the airlines' audit programs were inefficient.
In some cases "maintenance problems either went undetected or reoccurred," the report said.
In one example, investigators found that FAA inspectors for an airline carrier only visited four of the carrier's 15 outside contractors.
In another example, an airline's foreign repair facility was not visited by inspectors for five years after it was initially approved by the FAA. By this time, the facility had worked on 39 of the 53 engines the airline sent for maintenance, investigators found.
The report also noted that in numerous repair stations "problems existed," such as "untrained mechanics, lack of required tools, and unsafe storage of aircraft parts."
Investigators said the majority of problems were "not immediate safety-of-flight issues," but that they could "affect aircraft safety over time if left uncorrected."
Some airlines, for example American Airlines, perform all maintenance in-house or within the United States, but the report noted air carriers have increased the amount of work outsourced to foreign contractors based largely in Central America and Asia.
Twenty-seven percent of heavy airframe maintenance were sent abroad in 2007, up from 21 percent in 2003, the report said.
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