Airlines ‘in need of a check-up’

Australia’s aircraft maintenance workforce is going for a check-up. It knows it’s getting older and there are fewer young people coming through the ranks. It also is keen to gauge how many apprentices are hired each year and what shape the industry will take to survive in the long term. These are all issues that have dogged the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association, the union representing aircraft maintenance engineers, for years.

“We have a research proposal in to try [to] identify how many licensed aircraft maintenance engineers and unlicensed engineers there are, where they’re working, where the skills shortage is and what their value is to the Australian aircraft industry,” ALAEA representative Stephen Re says.

“We know there’s a shortage because the government has included aircraft maintenance engineers on the skilled migrant list, but to date no one has done the research to show the size of the skills shortage in this area.”

The union is pairing with the Australian School of Business at the University of NSW to apply for funding for the research and has the support of other unions within the aviation industry including the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, the Transport Workers Union, the Flight Attendants Association of Australia (domestic) and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority.

One of the key reasons the union is interested in the research is a growing concern among aircraft maintenance workers over the increasing amount of outsourcing done by Australian carriers and what Re says is a spiral of decay among maintenance facilities across the country.

“We’re worried about a scenario where an airline will need maintenance on an aircraft, but there won’t be enough engineers to do the work,” he says.
“The airline will then get the work done elsewhere, possibly offshore, while the Australian facility misses out on the work and eventually closes.”
Maintenance work on Australian carriers at present can be done anywhere from Singapore and Hong Kong to the US west coast.

In recent years some of the larger carriers have closed their Australian maintenance facilities, such as Qantas’s Sydney facility, which closed in 2006, with the loss of 440 maintenance jobs.

SkyAirWorld, a smaller airline servicing the Christmas and Coco Islands, closed its facilities in Brisbane after the company folded in March last year.
Many of the larger airlines also have reduced their intake of apprentices for licensed engineers in recent years, Re says.

There are 1825 apprentices studying aircraft maintenance at public colleges across the country, according to the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. “We know that the number of apprenticeships being offered is dropping, but we really want to know exact numbers so we can take it to the government and show them what state the aircraft maintenance industry is in,” Re says.

“What we know is the numbers now compared to 10 years ago are greatly reduced.”
An ageing population is another key issue for the industry. Among the numbers of licensed aircraft maintenance engineers and unlicensed engineers represented by the union today, 50 per cent are over age 50, according to Re. “I know a lot of the [licensed] and unlicensed engineers are looking to retire shortly and we have to question who is going to fill their roles when they go,” Re says.

The ALAEA isn’t the only union concerned about the shortfall of aircraft maintenance workers. The AMWU’s Ian Curry says the lack of replacement of licensed and unlicensed engineers will come back to haunt Australia in the near future if more isn’t done to increase numbers.

“Under normal circumstances we need one apprenticeship starting each year for every five tradespeople in Australia and we haven’t got anywhere near that at the moment, and these are not normal circumstances, we’re in a growing economy,” he says.

“We’re very concerned and have been for some time about the numbers of apprentices coming through the ranks. The problem is once we’ve lost the capacity with our aircraft maintenance engineers we’ll never get it back again.”

Curry points to the large number of fly-in, fly-out workers associated with the growing mining and construction sectors across the country.
“In the past a new mine opening up in Queensland or West Australia would mean a new community would be built, but now all those workers are being housed in camps and flown in and out each week and all those aircraft need to be maintained,” he says.