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!