Special Issues Related to the Aircraft Maintenance Community

Special Issues Related to the Aircraft Maintenance Community

There are some special issues related to the aircraft maintenance community. Choose one aircraft maintenance issue and respond the questions below concering the issue (Airline Outsourcing).  Should be at least one or more paragraphs in length.

What are the maintenance details of this issue?

How should a manager address this issue?

Solution

There are several special issues related to aircraft maintenance community but Complacency is one of the most dangerous issues which can cause heavy damages in aviation and also one of the easiest to control. Some of common causes of Complacency in employees’ is experience with high degree of knowledge or skills acquired, fatigue, repetitive mundane working style, lack of management appreciation, zero rewards and recognition, automation, lack of competition and acceptance of mediocre performance by managers.

Years of repetitive duties result in Complacency which makes employees skip all the required procedural steps for safety to be ensured. The checklists are ignored to get work done faster or the instruments are not monitored closely just to finish the duty before time. Human resources are backbone of Aviation sector and require continuous monitoring to get optimal employee productivity but due to complacency in employees they resort to shortcuts in their deliverables and this skipping of protocols and regulations often results in fatal aviation accidents. When any employee believes that formula to deliver the best performance has been discovered, they don’t strive for improvement or better alternative methods. Repetitive duties are performed which also leads to shortcuts in achieving results without following all the health and safety guidelines. For example if daily step by step check of all the safety measures is not done by ground crew, the aviation accidents would become frequent. Sometimes due to repetitive duties, few steps might be skipped by crew based on their experience and knowledge to finish the task faster but this could result in a high risk situation for the aircraft as complete check was not completed. Thus complacency is very frequent and one the biggest internal factors which contribute to high risk scenarios in aviation.

Managers play the most important role in controlling and avoiding complacency in their employees. One of the most effective ways to monitor complacency is Expectation setting. The checklists have to be designed for each and every process assuming how the worst scenario needs to be tackled. The next step for manager would be to analyse the performance as per the checklist. The mediocre performance of employees cannot be rewarded and the poor performance cannot be ignored. The employees need to be trained on the effect of their below standard performance. Both new and experience employee trainings need to be conducted regularly on the procedural checklists required for them. If there is no complacency in monitoring the employees by the manager, the complacency of employees can easy be controlled. Managers can also create competitive environment to tackle complacency where contests of best performers can be frequently run keeping the employees on their toes. Regular competition and monitoring of each key performance indicators will show employees the dedication of managers and inspire them to keep their complacency in control.