Potential red herring here. Some of these "third world" facilities provide a level of service exceeding what you would find in a US based shop. The airlines should feel lucky Oberstar got fired by the MN tea party; he'd be all over this like white on rice.

Outsourcing Raises Serious Safety Questions

The problem with outsourcing, particularly to maintenance and repair shops located overseas, is that these shops are difficult to monitor. In addition to the 4,227 domestic repair shops located in the U.S., there are roughly 700 FAA approved foreign repair shops in 70 countries. The FAA is required to inspect and monitor all of these on a regular basis through a system of checks and balances. According to the DOT’s Inspector General, this system is flawed.

The OIG report, Air Carriers’ Outsourcing of Aircraft Maintenance, Federal Aviation Administration Report Number: AV-2008-090, issued on September 30, 2008, became a scathing review of the FAA’s role, or lack thereof, in the inspection and supervision of many foreign aircraft maintenance shops, which are supposed to maintain comparable safety standards to the U.S. counterparts.

The Inspector General reported that the FAA and industry inspectors have not been properly monitoring aircraft maintenance work. According to the report, “while the FAA has begun moving its safety oversight toward a risk-based system, it still relies too heavily on air carriers’ oversight procedures, which are not always sufficient.”

Specifically, the OIG determined that the “FAA did not (1) have an adequate system for determining how much and where the most critical maintenance occurs, (2) have a specific policy governing when certificate management inspectors should visit repair stations performing substantial maintenance, (3) require inspectors to validate that repair stations have corrected deficiencies identified in air carrier audits, and (4) have adequate controls to ensure that inspectors document inspection findings in the national database and review related findings by other inspectors. As a result, the FAA could not effectively target its inspection resources to those repair stations providing the highest volume of repairs, which caused deficiencies at repair stations to go undetected or reoccur and prevented inspectors from obtaining sufficient data to perform comprehensive risk assessments.”

Close Calls Don’t Inspire Confidence

One foreign shop, in particular, became the focus of NPR’s report on the industry’s growing trend of outsourcing maintenance. That particular facility is Aeroman repair station in El Salvador which made a mistake that could have potentially been catastrophic. In January 2009, a US Airways jet traveling from Omaha to Phoenix was forced to land in Denver after the pressure seal around the main cabin door started to fail. It was later discovered that the mechanics at Aeroman had installed an important door component backwards.