The 20...not the 80!

If you are an advocate for the 80-20 rule even amongst professional circles, if not personal, you would quite easily understand the context of this post.
The importance of mindset for AME’s and AME students, covered in the last 3 posts, is that 20 percent of the solution that accounts for 80 percent of the problem. And it is precisely this 20 percent that you really need to build up during all the 3 years of AME training that you go through. No doubt there are academics to be engaged in, classes to attend and assignments to be completed on a daily basis. However, day after day, you need to remind yourself about this mindset you need to fit into.

The question to ask is, 3 years? Does it really take that long?? For some students, yes. Others pick up quicker, but then when you have 3 years, there is no real advantage to be had by picking up this mindset and start running a virtual rat race that really does not even exist! Most students start becoming impatient, trying to grasp more than they can really handle. I know, I did! Everyday you have the question “When am I going to become? When am I going to ‘arrive’? When can I really let myself loose (on all these nice airplanes?!”

Ease yourself into the curriculum, taking note of all there is to this vast, engrossing, exciting world that is Aviation. Try and get a wider or larger perspective to this world rather than limit yourself to immediate concerns of assignments, practicals, exams, competition (“I’m better than you!...any given day!!” mentality), syllabus, etc. Bear in mind you’re practically already in a profession. “Then why the 3 years of training?!” Do you really want to know? Well, quite simply, so that you don’t hurt yourself, and a thousand others, in your enthusiasm and excitement of having the opportunity to work and perform tasks on those “sleek/neat/awesome” flying machines! It is the ‘growing-up’ phase if you get what I mean.

In the following posts we’ll discuss how we can largely help ourselves, to focus our minds more on soaking in the larger picture that aviation is, rather than limit ourselves to the nitty-gritty daily’s.

The Solution - Part III - ...to a Mindset of Change

While at AME school, we often had guest lecturers. Established gurus in the field of aircraft maintenance, through their many years of experience, taking time out of their schedules to have a talk with us. A simple walk through their various experiences in their careers was enough to make our day. Sometimes anecdotic, and other times lessons they learned, these talks were simply mesmerizing for us students…example, aircraft hydraulic systems in a whole new light, when our lecturer explained just how painful it can be when synthetic base hydraulic fluid gets into the eyes! A whole new light… truly!!
Mr. Anant Karnik, a retired Air India Director of Maintenance, would visit us more often than any other. He usually recommended reading material in the form of magazines, periodicals and even works of fiction. While most of his recommendations encompassed aviation topics, one particular recommendation I never really understood in the context of aviation. The book was called “Future Shock” – by Alvin Toffler. Well, I did pick up the book and read it almost halfway, and then, I put it aside. It was not so much the content of the book that prompted me to put it away for another day. I believe I was searching, in every page, the context of what was professed in relation with my life and career in aircraft maintenance. The search proved futile until almost a decade later when I picked up the book again and read a few lines. It didn’t take more than a page of reading to grasp just why Mr. Karnik recommended this book in an aircraft maintenance engineering classroom!

Change, is the only constant in aviation. In aircraft maintenance, everything from simple nuts and bolts to complex operating principles of turbine engines, gets redefined every few years. Nuts and bolts ? Redefined?! Absolutely. The drive is always towards faster, cheaper, cleaner, easier...the three E’s namely Economy, Efficiency, and Ecology, almost always in combination.

The emphasis then, is for us maintenance people to grasp change faster, better. Simply moving at the pace at which aircraft’s move from prototype to obsolescence, involves regular training sessions, examinations (written and practical), and application. The ‘learn-unlearn-relearn’ paradigm revisited!
New methods, processes, new technologies, terminologies, new concepts, they take their turn to bombard us every single day that they make their way into the aircraft we maintain. There is the constant need to be ‘ahead of your aircraft’.

Very early in our careers we need to shift our mindset to accept change more swiftly. We need to change our mindset, to a mindset of change.

The Solution - Part II - A Change of Mindset...

When you move from college straight to AME school, you tend to carry habits along. Study habits, reporting time habits, sleeping and waking habits and so on. If you don’t shed these habits soon enough, they will get the better of you. Why? Quite simply because these habits just don’t fit-in with the world of aircraft maintenance. They are simply, UNACCEPTABLE.
You have to begin to understand that the methods you so successfully employed to get you through school and college, will actually work against you in AME school.

You have to learn to change, from the mindset of:
fixed study topics, to a mindset of applying knowledge between topics and even between subjects;
fixed type of solutions to fixed type of questions, to a mindset of screening all possibilities for a given problem;
fixed type of problems, to a mindset of a problem that changes every time you turn around to fetch a wrench;
fixed syllabus for every subject for every exam, to a mindset of …”syllabus? What’s that??”;
fixed study schedules and timeframes, to a mindset of catching a few words of exam preparation in between flights;
‘fixed’, to a mindset of ‘change’.

The only thing fixed, IS Change.
The transition is difficult, no doubt, even for 18year olds. But, some manage it, and it serves them well.

The Solution - Part I - A Catharsis

We know now that studying for the CAR examinations, by picking through questions from a ‘special-latest-edition’ question bank, only exacerbates the problem for any person desiring to make a career in aircraft maintenance. So what’s the solution?
“Let’s get beyond the problem and the preachy statements shall we!”
“Yes, let’s have some real, practical, tangible and obviously executable methods!”

From the outset, I admit, the solution is not an easy one and neither is it a one-fit-all.

From time immemorial we’ve been studying for our subjects by memorizing, by attempting to learn without completing understanding a topic, clamoring for that one extra mark to outdo the person next to us. At school we did it and discovered great success. In college we got even better at grabbing; 96.77% is no-where near 96.76 right! Oh yes, it makes all the difference! Between making it to a great college and not, between getting the choicest subjects or being stuck with the ‘third- rate’ subjects that only losers take up voluntarily! It makes all the difference when you go to get those ‘in-demand’ jobs doesn’t it.

Ok, now that’s a trend today, and this is not the place to tide against it. This is a discussion on the field of aviation, and more precisely aircraft maintenance. This is an area of study that prepares you in a highly professional, disciplined and intensive vocation. Here, application of knowledge is more significant than the mere possession of it . Examinations are a constant, and your mark being 10 or even 20 percentile higher than your colleagues’, is no differentiator of who is more successful, at getting the job, or even keeping it.
The job itself entails several challenges. Responsibility is high; decision making skills are put to the test with safety on the one end and operational limitations on the other, in an environment that can be hostile even for the more seasoned professionals.
You respect Time, or it leaves you behind…far behind!

Retribution?

No. I do not want to sound like it, and certainly not wish it on anyone – regardless of their method of study. Without sounding pedantic about an aviation regulation examination, my intention is to highlight how and why short cuts, even in increasingly competitive and difficult times, never lead to an ultimate goal. Cliché though it might be, in aviation, short cuts lead to disaster.

From both Case # 1 and Case # 2, it’s clear that Failure is an end result. But, perhaps more important, and the cause of prime concern, is that someone avidly interested & passionate about aviation can quite easily venture down this path of frustration & disgruntlement & mediocrity - “All my friends are studying from question banks! What a fool I’ll look like when they pass and I fail!!”

There is one big assumption I have made in the last post - that a person gets through all examinations and tests, right to the edge (and beyond) of being granted the privilege to certify an aircraft for flight. In the real world, such people never really get that far. In most countries there are enough built-in provisions in their licensing systems to ‘weed out’ those who are basically incompetent not only in terms of knowledge & skills, but also in terms of decision making of the magnitude explained earlier.

Yet students venture down this question-bank-study-method approach. Maybe because it tends to give a sense of a shorter, quicker, easier path to achieving and experiencing their ‘dream’ - A somewhat hazy yet distinct and undeniable picture of standing by, watching their aircraft slide silently off the runway into the sky.
Unfortunately, it is a sad ending to a Dream, a Passion, a Drive that brought them out to AME school every morning all perked up and bushy tailed.

Retribution? I think not, again. A drive to churn out better, happier and more successful careers whilst making our skies safer? Just about right!

Case # 2 - Question Bank Study - Pass (-age to Failure)!

Ok, at the opposite end of the spectrum (and as mentioned in my previous post), say you answer quite a few questions correctly; enough to pass the exam. When the results emerge, you absolutely erupt! I know, I did!!

Let’s not take into account here how many attempts it took you to get past that illusive Paper I – Regulations. We’re only considering here that you studied primarily from previous exam Questions (Question banks), and on D-Day, came up triumphs.
Obviously, this method of study now becomes your mantra for all other exams you appear in toward the path of becoming an AME. You may even be successful, even wildly so, using this method, to conquer all-and-behold! – Paper 2, Paper 3, & Paper 4 (Type/Specific).
Well, what next? You’ve been flattered to deceive…yourself!

The day arrives that you have to make a go-no go decision for an airliner carrying 400 people across the Atlantic. As charismatic as that may sound, you won’t find answers to make that decision in any book, or manual, or a single ‘support device’. Suddenly, you will find yourself at the centre of making the mother of all decisions you’ve ever made in your life. And everyone around you (the wide eyed technicians and juniors, the hand-on-hip pilot, the clock watching management executive…), will be looking straight at you! And then there will be those, “Now, Wait …wait…let’s just see how he reacts!”, “Will he? Won’t he?”
I think I can guess what will be going through your mind, “Now What?!” If you ever find yourself in that position, here are my two words of encouragement for you, in advance, “Good Luck!”

Case # 1 - Question Bank Study - Failure

Say you prepared hard from your Question Banks but you had that one bad day on the day of the exam. Nothing went to plan.
After you’re done analyzing why you didn’t pass, maybe by the narrowest of margins, you get back to your ‘routine’…which one?...the one about preparing from question banks! Why? Let’s look at the possible thoughts in your mind right now.

“well, maybe I forgot a couple of correct answers to certain questions…”
“Maybe the examiner mixed up some of the options and wordings, so I’m going to be ready for that next time around!”
“I’ve come too far already now to go back and pound through leaflets and leaflets of jargon!”
You force yourself to pick up your regulations book once again, go through a few pages of that ‘jargon’ and – “Ah, I know this! This is that question…the answer to this is that…I know it all!”
“I think I need more questions. There are probably some questions I’ve not covered…let me buy that other question bank by that other author. More questions…more…more…collect more…collect…collect !”
And now that you’ve got a whole lot more questions, “Now we’ll see who’s smarter!”

In all likelihood, you’ll follow the question bank approach until you pass…finally! The thing about it is that you’ll have passed an exam, without much clue about the subject matter.
“Who cares?!”

Well, let’s see how this has actually brought you closer to failure, than success, to your goal of becoming an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer at a major airline.