AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2020 - 98

P&E

SAVVY MAINTENANCE

SPECIALISTS VERSUS GENERALISTS

Sadly, those days are gone. The Cessna
and Beechcraft dealerships at John Wayne
Airport are long gone, and the old Piper
dealership now exists primarily as a shop
catering to bizjets and turboprops. If you
base a Cessna single at John Wayne and
need maintenance done, the Cessna authorized service center on the field is Jay's
Aircraft Maintenance Inc. It's a good shop,
but the fact that it's an authorized service
center doesn't mean that it only works on
Cessnas the way it used to. According to
Jay's website, "We are equipped to perform maintenance on any aircraft under
12,000 lbs., including but not limited to
those manufactured by Cessna, Piper,
Beechcraft, Cirrus, and Socata."
With a few notable exceptions, that's
the situation today with most shops that
work on general aviation piston airplanes.
They may have one or more factory-authorized service center signs on the building,
but they work on anything with wings that
comes through the hangar door. They have
to do this to remain in business.
So, the A&P/IA who starts the annual
inspection of your Skylane might well have
just finished working on a Comanche or a
Baron or a Cub. He's most likely a generalist, not a specialist. Instead of knowing a
lot about a few aircraft models, he knows
a little about a lot of aircraft models-
occasionally just enough to be dangerous.
That's not good.
ATTRITION

There are far fewer maintenance shops that
work on piston airplanes than there used to
be. Over the past decade, lots of small shops
have gone out of business. Of those that
remain, the best ones are typically booked
solid for many months in advance, making
it difficult for aircraft owners to cope with
unscheduled maintenance needs.
The shops that have gone out of business haven't done so because of lack of
demand. Generally, it's because they can't
find enough qualified mechanics to hire.
Maintenance shops have substantial fixed
costs (rent, insurance, and more) and to
be profitable they must be big enough to
support that overhead. From what I've
observed over the years, it's tough to make
98 | AOPA PILOT September 2020

The shops that have gone out of business
haven't done so because of lack of demand.
Generally, it's because they can't find enough
qualified mechanics to hire.
a go of a shop unless there are at least five
or six mechanics swinging wrenches and
billing time. Fewer than that and the shop
is likely to start losing money, forced to cut
back, and ultimately go out of business.
My colleagues who own piston GA
maintenance shops are constantly complaining about losing A&Ps to the airlines,
big turbine shops, and even to automotive
and industrial maintenance shops that pay
more and have better benefits than they
can afford. And they're constantly complaining about the extreme difficulty of
replacing an A&P who leaves.
A colleague who owns a shop in
Pennsylvania told me this: The mechanic
that just left my shop was about as good as
it gets for a new hire. He worked on C-130s
in the Air Force for seven years, had good
mechanical ability, a good attitude, enjoyed
his work, was local, and had health insurance through his wife who worked for the
local government. I hired him to start at $21
per hour with two weeks paid vacation and
paid holidays. He picked up the mechanical
aspects of the job quickly and turned out to
be an excellent wrench.

Sadly, I ended up losing this trainee to
a specialty steel mill who offered him $34
per hour with full benefits. In his exit interview, he said he really liked working at my
shop, but the combination of higher pay and
401(k) was the deciding factor for him.
I pay my mechanics for eight hours of
work, but at best they can only generate five
or six billable hours per day. Between the
cost of rent, insurance, my office manager's
salary, and other overhead costs of running
the shop, there's no way I can compete with
the steel mill without raising my shop rate
pretty drastically from its current $92 per
hour. I'm afraid I'd alienate my customers
if I did that.
My search for replacements for this
trainee turned up 20 mechanics. Only two
were A&Ps, and neither of them was as
good as the unlicensed mechanics. I wound
up interviewing four, none of whom had
aviation experience. Two had submitted
résumés that grossly overstated their maintenance experience. A third wanted to start
at $30 per hour plus health insurance. The
last one was a recent high school graduate
who couldn't identify a 1/4-inch drive rachet

IF YOU VISIT THIS excellent Cessna Authorized Service Center in South Bend, Indiana, you'll

find the mechanics working on everything from Mooneys to Beechcraft to Learjets, too.

AOPA Pilot Magazine - September 2020

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