Aircraft Maintenance
Safety Compliance

I found an article published in Aero Safety world raised serious concerns about safety compliance among aircraft maintenance technicians and their managers. The report is about compliance procedures to ensure aircraft safety. This report is based on a Baines Simmons employee safety culture survey that canvassed 2,000 maintenance professionals in union and non-union aircraft maintenance shops in North and South America over a period of three years (2007-2010). Within this survey the findings were quite alarming, such as, more than eighty percent of the maintenance personnel surveyed said that it is necessary and actually acceptable to sacrifice safety and compliance to complete their jobs on time. Also, sixteen percent of the managers agreed with the statement, “Due to limited time or resources, there have been times when I signed off for work that was not completed.” Lastly, the article stated that fifty three percent of Aircraft Maintenance Technicians disagreed with the statement, “Before I start a job I am always given the necessary information.”

These and similar results within the report indicate that it’s not uncommon for technicians and their managers to ignore procedures, and perform maintenance without the proper information as well as signing off on work that was not completed. It is stressed that there is great importance in cultivating/instilling Safety Management System (SMS) into the maintenance process. With

a main concern with technicians believing that management values productivity over safety, they tend to become more lax in their work environment, habits, and stop raising safety and compliance concerns.

There is an understanding with many business consultants that an effective safety management culture can be a challenge. Aside from management providing more safety lectures, technology can help aircraft maintenance technicians improve safety and compliance. Although technology itself cannot change the underlying culture of a workplace, it has the potential to make it easier for staff to adopt better practices and ensure compliance. An example was given within the article stating the Enigma In Service Job Card Generator combines date from maintenance planning system with service and parts information to produce job cards (task cards) in-the-fly. Enigma combines resources, tools and equipment data with the latest maintenance manuals and parts catalogs. This gives technicians a complete and up-to-date set of service information for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. Thus eliminating the time-consuming process of collecting necessary maintenance information, allowing productivity and compliance to go hand-in-hand.

When it comes to safety and compliance Enigma job cards are capable of accomplishing many tasks. They can digitally record the details of a service activity, inspections, along with relevant information, all that gets routed back into the maintenance planning system for compliance, audit and management purposes. When fifty three percent of technicians and thirty seven percent of managers think that technicians lack critical maintenance information, this leaves the main issue being what should be done to improve a shops safety management culture. Safety and compliance encompasses more than just management dashboards and tracking systems, it’s about improving the underlying process of maintenance. This change needs to be implemented by management first and by doing so it will change the way technicians believe that management values productivity over safety.

Work Cited

http://uptimeblog.enigma.com http://flightsafety.org https://www.conklindd.com