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the scene, our local partners had already begun making contact with the airline s managers to assess who would
make the buying decision and how much loot would have to be distributed to ease the whole sales process. So, in
one way at least, the project sales team had effectively assessed the local commercial culture and adapted their
sales approach to it. But there were other aspects of doing business in this delightful country that were
unfortunately overlooked or at least underestimated and these errors of judgement led to our rapid undoing.
Joyously I left a grim European winter to arrive in the humid thirty degrees sunshine of Asia. On my first day
on the project, the project lead took me through page after page of a lengthy computer listing of all the
maintenance parts stock held by the airline. The incomprehensible numbers and aircraft part codes meant nothing
to me. But he explained that the place was a goldmine of excess stock. Here, he said, pointing to something or
other, there s at least three years supply. And here. And here& & . And so it went on. Apparently, in his expert
opinion, there were millions here that could be sold with no trouble it would be easy, he reckoned, to sell on the
maintenance improvement project once we had started generating so much cash.
Avoiding the massive and unpleasant-looking spiders hanging in the trees between the maintenance
department s offices and the stock areas, we set off to check a few of the juicier items on the stock listing. If I
remember correctly, we were looking for wings for Boeing 737s and 747s and gyroscopes apparently
gyroscopes are incredibly expensive. Now, you d think, especially if you were fairly inexpert like me and had only
seen an aircraft wing when you looked out of your plane s window, that they are fairly large and it would be quite
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difficult to lose five or ten of them, even in quite a big stock building. But we searched and we searched and didn t
find ten wings, nor even five we found one! And that was considerably less than the number on the wondrous
stock listing. Well, maybe they re somewhere else, the project manager concluded as he turned his attention to
the next juicy item on the list gyroscopes for Boeing 747s. Eventually, we actually did find one of these. But
though it was listed as new it most definitely was not and had seen better days with at least one other airline
before arriving to gather dust here. We tried a few other parts with the same depressing results. Either the parts
were simply not there in the quantities listed or else items described as new had actually been used before and had
been refurbished with widely varying degrees of professionalism.
How to explain this strange set of circumstances? Possibly, the stock listing that our experts had produced was
simply wildly inaccurate. Possibly many of the parts on the listing had actually been used up long before, but due to
poor record-keeping, were still showing as available. So perhaps all the missing wings and invisible fuselages and
second hand gyroscopes and so on were all part of a series of administrative errors. There were, however, other
less innocent explanations for the parts stock discrepancies. These explanations owed more to the colourful local
commercial culture than just being due to poor book-keeping. One idea that was floated was that airline executives
were selling off many parts and pocketing the income for themselves. Moreover, from several sources we heard
rumours that a local supplier of spares was in cahoots with maintenance management and was knowingly
supplying second-hand refurbished parts but getting paid for them as if they were new and that the conspirators
were splitting the proceeds of their profitable little enterprise.
Now before Boeing and Airbus set their lawyers on me and have my book banned, I would humbly draw their
attention to a warning issued by the Italian civil aviation authority ENAC to over three hundred airlines and aircraft
maintenance operators in January 2002.(1) The warning concerned at least one company suspected of stripping
down old aircraft, taking out used parts, falsifying documentation to make the parts appear in better condition than
they really were and then selling them on for use in civil airliners. ENAC advised airline maintenance departments
to check that all second-hand parts already installed on aircraft actually could be safely used. Now, I m sure the
whole thing was a misunderstanding and that all those involved will be shown to be innocent those with the best
connections into the Italian government, the Mafia and the police will no doubt be proven to be the most innocent
of all. And I believe totally the Italian traffic minister, when he claimed that at no time has passenger safety ever
been put at risk from this allegedly illegal trade in used aircraft components and accompanying false
documentation. But if such an unfortunate allegation can surface in an only moderately corrupt country like Italy,
the mind boggles at what might really be going in a moral sewer like the Asian country where we were working.
Anyway, the bottom line was that the supposed goldmine, which was due to fund our maintenance
improvement project, was unpleasantly empty what was not clear was whether the gold had simply been
honestly used, but its use had not been accurately recorded, or whether there were more sinister explanations for
the huge shortfall. We had no way of finding out whether there had ever been any gold i the first place or
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whether some enterprising individuals had got there ahead of us and had dug out most of the gold before we could
get our hands on it. We did find a little bit of inventory here and there, but it was arguable whether it was really
excess to the airline s requirements and in no way was it sufficient to fund the project that we had hoped to sell.
That left us with a rather embarrassing, but more challenging, situation we had the project that the client
needed, but the client didn t have the cash that we needed them to pay for the project. We now had two choices
either we could pack up and go home or we could stay there and try to find some other way of helping the client
generate the money necessary to pay for our project. I had just arrived, the weather was fabulous, we were
having lots of fun and we had planned to go to a well-known holiday island the next weekend. So we were not in
the mood to give up so easily and resolved to fight on after a wonderful weekend, of course.
For the next week we took a conference room at our hotel and started to work on alternative ways of getting
this client to buy our project. As we couldn t flog off aircraft parts to get some cash, we decided to focus on
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maintenance productivity instead. We got hold of records on how long the maintenance department took to
complete their A Checks , B Checks and C Checks these are compulsory regular maintenance operations
undertaken after specified numbers of flying hours or distance travelled. The A Checks are the shortest and most [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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