Hello everyone,
I’m trying to find out on internet but without any progress, and I’m thinking that this great forum maybe can give answer.
Question is, what education and experience is needed to start aircraft service organisation?
Now, question to question is perhaps for what type of aircraft, what model etc., and to simplify question..
let’s say organisation just for Continental and Lycoming engine rebuilding.
What school? Is it mechanical university degree enough? Or you have to have special training? If yes, where and
what is estimate price to get that?
Thanks a lot.
Under EASA you will need to go to a Part 147 training school, which typically takes a couple of years. After that you need some years of experiance before you can become a licensed Part 66 engineer.
Depending on which aircraft types you would like to work on you need to pass type examination and get on the job training.
After a few more years having a license you can perform more complex tasks in a maintenance organisation. For engine rebuilding you typically would be working as a Part M-F or Part 145 company.
Under FAA you would need to get an A&P, for which you would also need to have experiance, and their must be a need to become A&P when living outside USA.
Expect a couple of years study and some thousends on education and exams.
Sounds like becoming an aircraft engineer is more complicated and takes longer than becoming a pilot. We have it easy :-)
It just takes years. It would be hard to meet the requirements without a fulltime job. We do have mandatory type ratings as well if you progress to the more complex aircraft.
I think Jesse has very accurately outlined the steps required to enable you to get involved in aircraft maintenance and this explication makes clear just why in ten years time there will be no GA engineering staff.
The effort needed to get a part 66 licence for GA types simply is not justified by the rewards so the savvy young people don’t get involved in Engineering and defenatly don’t get involved in GA. A few days back I saw a report that the average hourly charge for car repair was £ 95, I would guess that the average charge per hour in GA maintenance would be IRO £ 55.
This would be sustainable if it were not for the inapropriate regulation and training requirements that the woefully out of touch EASA imposes.
The EASA bosses did come out of the Cologne ivory tower and attend a conference in Rome a few weeks back and got told some very uncomfortable truths, it will be interesting to see if they go back to their offices and do something positive or just bury their heads in the sand. GA in Europe is on the brink of total destruction following the inept oversight delivered by EASA, Commercial aviation needs to look out because once EASA has regulated GA out of existence the EASA system will turn on whoever is avalable to keep the organization in business.
Vic
That is the very nub of the problem within the EU, some states want the very minimum of govenment regulation and others want to controler every little thing a citizen does.
The the best air safety in the GA sector has been delivered by the USA, Australia and the UK who all have a relitivly soft touch to regulation, so why do we have to be listening to regulators from states that have failed to deliver effective oversight ?
Thanks a lot for answers.
There are some grandfather routes e.g. go to the USA and do an A&P (maybe 2 years’ stay while working on maintenance) which gives you certain credits towards EASA66 stuff. A colleague of mine (A&P/IA) has done this recently.
But there is no quick shortcut. Every route involves work experience, and it’s not well paid work. You have to like working on small planes. A lot of people are leaving piston GA maintenance and going to work on big jets, where the pay is a lot higher despite the work being described as “brain dead simple”.
The only grandfather item is that they accept is experiance. So it doesn’t give you an advantage unlike you would like to be FAA AND EASA licensed.
The same is true the other way around, FAA accepts the experiance under EASA license, but does not accept any exams.
The license structure between FAA and EASA is completely diffent, the EASA one being more fragmented / limited / stricter.
