[Peetwo]

International Asia-Pacific MRO conference,  28 February 2019 - Avalon Airshow. 

By Ironsider, via the Oz:

More engineers and clear rules are goals

The Australian-25 Feb 2019

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Australia’s aircraft maintenance industry is at a crossroads of staffing and regulatory challenges, industry stakeholders have warned.


On one hand there is the looming global shortage of aircraft maintenance engineers that is most acute in the Asia-Pacific region.

On the other, there is the challenge of disharmonious regulation for aircraft maintenance that exists throughout the world.

Those issues, and others affecting the industry, will be tackled at the International Asia-Pacific MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) Conference at Avalon 2019 on Thursday.

Organised by executive director of the Aviation Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul Business Association, Ken Cannane, the conference will feature 10 presentations from industry stakeholders including Boeing and Airbus and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and Qantas.

“Work has gone offshore as far as the airlines are concerned but we’re progressively doing things in the regulation space, to make Australia more competitive in the region,” Cannane says. “People have started to realise it is one big industry, and there needs to be a harmonious approach from one country to the next.”

He says that under the current “prescriptive approach”, it is possible for one company working on an aircraft to have to comply with up to seven regulatory systems.

“Some changes to regulations were made about a decade ago, but they did little to remove some of the provisions that were time-consuming and did nothing for safety. It was just old sort of stuff,” Cannane says. “Now they’re looking at proper reviews and harmonising [regulations] in the Asia-Pacific.”

Cannane says the potential for growth in the aircraft-maintenance sector, with an estimated global worth of $84 billion, is enormous given the expansion of the aviation industry.

Boeing’s industry outlook for the next 20 years has forecast another 754,000 aviation technicians will be needed worldwide, with more than a third of that demand coming from the Asia-Pacific.

Associate professor Anne Junor of the University of NSW Business School says the emerging global shortage of qualified and licensed aircraft maintenance engineers is particularly acute in this region.

“In Australia, the shortage is adversely affecting the general aviation and regional aviation sectors, on which regional and rural Australia depends,” Junor says.

“The short is largely a legacy of the offshoring of maintenance work that started in earnest in 2006 and progressively resulted in a decline in apprentice intakes.” Junor describes the situation as a “national tragedy”.

“We are rapidly losing the window of opportunity whereby Australia has had the opportunity to build maintenance training as a significant part of Australia’s education industry, helping meet future skills in the region,” she says.

Adding to that challenge, is that Australian licences for maintenance engineers are not recognised everywhere overseas following a botched attempt to align the nation’s training with that in Europe.

Adjunct professor Ian Hampson, of Macquarie University’s Centre for Workforce Futures, says that has been a “body blow to Australian training and licensing”.

Junor says it would be terrible to see the aviation industry go the same way as expertise in the country’s automotive industry following car-plant shutdowns.

“Australia is highly dependent on air transport and we cannot afford to see the loss of aviation skills,” Junor says.

Hampson says aircraft maintenance engineers will always be needed in Australia because of its geography.

“There are some planes we have to maintain here because we can’t fly them to Singapore [as a maintenance hub], they simply don’t have the range,” he says. “Aircraft used by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, rescue helicopters and police rescue — geography won’t allow those aircraft to be maintained overseas.”

Cannane says the education sector is responding to the demand for aircraft-maintenance engineers, with more emphasis on vocational education and training in schools.

MTF...P2