Maintenance Planning
 

Who here is in charge of planning and scheduling maintenance for your aircraft? What are your biggest frustrations/challenges/concerns with the process?

Parts and timelines
 

Parts availability. Shop timelines. Example: Phenom 300 hot section inspection, they found some issues. Parts needed to fix the plane from Pratt and Whitney are on back order, P&W won’t give a timeline for when we’ll get them. Owner has JSSI loaner engine coverage for this exact hypothetical issue, they don’t have enough loaner engines, we were only given a loaner engine for 4 weeks (plane has been down for almost 4 months now). Once parts arrive, we are airplane number 6 in line to get the work completed at the shop. It’s difficult to manage owner expectations and frustration when you can’t give a timeline for work completion or another loaner engine.

Another frustration can be repeated related AOGs. Owner will say “I thought we fixed that?”.

Yeah, parts are rough, and Pratt is definitely no exception. How are we still having supply chain issues?!

With the upcoming administration, you may reasonably expect those problems to get worse; especially regarding foreign parts (or parts made with foreign materials).

At this point, I’m assuming it’s just an excuse for incompetence, minimal staffing levels, or some other profit boosting practice that hurts customers.