Air Carrier MRO Handbook (An aviation week book) [Hardcover]

As for the book, it provides a pretty good introduction to aircraft certification and air carrier maintenance. Unfortunately, almost half of the book is devoted to the former item, something that is well covered in the literature. The book opens with a discussion of how laws are made, something quite afield from day-to-day MRO activity. There are also numerous typos and editorial errors that hint at the book being rushed to the publishing house. Cases in point, the wrong name for FAR part 21 in Table 4-1 and the technical error of separating the discussion of Bilateral Airworthiness Agreements (BAAs) from Bilateral Aviation Safety Agreements. The latter is replacing the former, a point missed in the book. The book also comes with a fair amount of politicking by the author, most egregious in Chapter 6 on Airworthiness Directives. It would seem more appropriate in this type of book to explain what AD's are and how they operate than lecture the FAA on the proper way to write them.

The reader is not really introduced to maintenance practices until page 245, almost exactly two-thirds of the way through the book. Remember this is what the book was supposed to be a handbook of to begin with. The maintenance discussion is good as far as it goes, but really needed another hundred pages to do it justice. One last point, the book could really use a scrub for acronyms. In many cases, the reader is left to wonder what is really being discussed. Not everybody knows that an FSEU is a Flap/Slat Electronics Unit! I would suggest that this book needs a fairly rapid revision to correct numerous technical errors, a new title, and certainly a lower price. Jack - you needed and deserved a better editor.

According to the Book Discription, "Air Carrier MRO Handbook fully explains and illustrates MRO in air carrier operations ... tunes up your knowledge base so you can streamline all phases and facets of [maintenance] operations.

According to the Book Info, "A guide to the maintenance, repair and overhaul of airplanes. Offers strategies to reach maintenance goals better and faster, ..."

This book does neither and proves once again why operators/maintainers are the source of MRO excellence and not the OEMs. MSG-3 and RCM are given minimal coverage, one chapter in Part 4, and neither Nowlan and Heap nor their seminal report "Reliability Centered Maintnenance" aren't even mentioned! The statement on page 251 in explaining RCM, "Its applicaion is, therefore, limited to items whose failure during airplane operation will not have catastrophic consequesnces" is flately wrong. Fifty pages in Part 4 are given to Continued Airworthiness Programs and 20 pages are given to Scheduled Maintenance. I will grant that a lot of what's in chapter 12 CASS Programs belongs somewhere else.

There is little to nothing in this book about Maintenace Program/Task Scheduling Optimization, Capacity Planning, Flight Operations integration, AMT shift bidding, union and HR relations, business and technical metrics, profitability in MRO insourcing, the list goes on and on. Again, refering to the book discription, "Offers strategies to reach maintenance goals better and faster, ...". Well this book doesn't discuss Technical Dispatch Rate, Maintenance CASM or even Form 41 basic metrics! How can it say it offers strategies to reach maintenance goals and not even discuss the basic metrics of those goals?

I've only spent 16 years in military and commercial MRO, so I do not have the wealth of experience that Mr. Hessburg has (and I mean that very sincerly), but I would warn the potential buyer that this book doesn't address the arms reach handbook resources that my clients nor myself need.