Rresearching of the factors affecting aviation safety in the process of outsourcing aircraft maintenance activities

Nowadays companies have a tendency to focus on their core competencies and contract out other business functions. Outsourcing is growing both in quality and diversity. Aircraft maintenance activities are the most common outsourced services, which airlines companies supply from the external sources. The most important purpose of outsourcing aircraft maintenance activities whose investment costs are high, expertise and experience requirements are excessive is to reduce the cost. On the other hand aircraft maintenance has major effects on aviation safety. In this study, the main aim is to find out what could the potential hazards and the reasons be if airlines companies in Turkey provided aircraft maintenance activities from the external sources. Thanks to understanding why and how they would affect safety, what kind of precautions could be taken will come out. Qualitative research design was preferred to achieve these goals by conducting semi-structured interviews in Turkish context, nominal group meeting and open-ended questionnaires qualitative data was collected and analyzed with an inductive method. In this respect, in order to receive support for the research, semi-structured interviews with the General Directorate of Civil Aviation; Anadolu University Civil Aviation Quality Manager and SMS Coordinator; and the Safety Management System specialist of Sunexpress Airlines were conducted. The data collected from the aforesaid interviews was used for the design of Nominal Group Technique, which was carried out on 17th February 2014.The data was collected from the SHY-145 certified airline companies operating in Turkey and maintenance companies whose core competencies are aircraft maintenance. When NGT data have been analyzed, as a result of outsourcing the procurement of aircraft maintenance activities, 13 different categories appeared potentially affecting aviation safety. These categories are MRO's human resources, time pressure, quality/SMS (MRO), MRO organization / management, contracts, facility, equipment, environment, climate, communication, audits, reporting, documentation, training, authorities/regulation and external environment. It was considered that taking the opinions of technicians who knew the outsourcing process but could not participate in NGT and the other aviation specialists would be better. In this respect, qualitative data was collected from the determined participants through open-ended questionnaires within the scope of purposive sampling. When the qualitative data collected from the open-ended questionnaires was analyzed inductively, three different themes were determined. These themes are: first, the price as a main competitive tool between MRO organizations, second, the cost reduction, seen as the main purpose of outsourcing and third, production function, shared between the two different companies. Moreover, the suggested solutions of the participants for these problems mentioned before were categorized under the themes identified. As a result of the analysis done at the end of both two data collection methods, it was seen that the remarkable factors were human resources and time pressure categories intensively. Keywords: Aircraft Maintenance Activities, Outsourcing, Aviation Safety, Hazard Analysis, Civil Aviation Management.