Avionics News February 2022 - 52

- I N T E R V I E W B Y
A
to the point of bucking industry norms.
Prior to Qmulus Aviation, Owens
served four years in the U.S. Marines
and worked for regional airlines,
aircraft manufacturers, charter member
companies and aviation government
contractors. In addition to maintaining
aircraft during his career, Owens has
managed maintenance facilities, a
quality assurance department and a
maintenance control and planning
department.
Recently, Owens talked with us about
how he adapts aircraft operations and
maintenance to support a company's
profit building.
When you say
maintenance can
contribute to a
company's profits,
what do you mean?
C
ris Owens has that rare ability to
look at a complex situation and
discern what's wrong, what's
working and what can be improved. He
can think innovatively and build out an
idea until it's reality.
A couple of years ago, Owens helped
launch Qmulus Aviation, a Part 145
repair station at Caldwell Industrial
Airport, a Boise, Idaho, suburb. He
wrote the repair station manual, quality
assurance manual, training manual and
capabilities list from scratch.
Owens, an avionics technician and
airframe and powerplant mechanic
with inspection authorization, is the
consummate accountable manager.
He takes his regulatory, financial and
fiduciary responsibilities quite seriously,
52 avionics news * february 2022
Between 2016 and 2019, I
worked for a regional airline
in Colorado. They only had 12
aircraft when I started. Since
it was a small company, I had
the opportunity to work on the
business side of their aviation
maintenance. I wrote several
maintenance programs, including
Approved Aircraft Inspection
Programs, which were very
forward-thinking. I wanted to
integrate aircraft maintenance
into their business model versus
having aircraft maintenance
look like a financial black hole.
Essentially, I wanted to take them
out of the dark ages in how they
handled aircraft maintenance.
C H R I S T I N E
K N A U E R
With...
» » » Cris Owens of Qmulus Aviation
How did the programs help
the regional airline?
I wrote three different maintenance
programs approved by the FAA,
which allowed them to double their
utilization. It was basically free money.
Think about that; just with a pen, I
was able to double their utilization.
No new infrastructure, no new
investment, nothing. It was a perfect
example of how aircraft maintenance
can be part of your profits. It can be
part of the business plan and part of
the bottom line to help grow your
margins.
Can you explain a little
more about how you were
able to do that?
One of the things I had to dig into
was their aircraft utilization and the
execution of maintenance per that
utilization. I quickly realized that we
were picking up cities, and our aircraft
utilization was going up. I could see
that maintenance was happening
more frequently, so much so that if
we didn't do something, we were
going to have airplanes sitting on top
of each other. The only way to avoid
that was to figure out how to expand
our maintenance capacity, and fast. I
wrote an Approved Aircraft Inspection
Program that gave us 200 hours flying
intervals versus 100 hours flying
intervals, effectively doubling the time
between inspections.
It's not exactly an easy thing to
do. There could be a training course
on this because you have to gather
a lot of information to determine
utilization. Once you have the data,
Cris Owens of Qmulus Aviation
Avionics News February 2022

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