Jeff Guzzetti is the president of Guzzetti Aviation Risk Discovery (GuARD), an aviation safety consulting firm that he formed following a 35-year career with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other agencies. During his 18 years at NTSB, Guzzetti was a field investigator, “go-team” engineer and Deputy Director. He then…

I have been teaching Human Factors (HF) courses for a very long time. And in my more than two decades of training aircraft maintenance personnel both in the United States as well as abroad, a common theme is noticeable — there can be a stigma associated with HF training. Aviation Maintenance Technicians (AMTs) are often…

Introduced in the late 1960s as part of airworthiness requirements, the aircraft minimum equipment list (MEL) is a document with a list of aircraft components or systems that may be inoperable for dispatch. Prior to the use of MEL, aircraft dispatch was a topic of negotiation between aircraft operators and regulators. Have things around the…

Travel restrictions imposed due to the coronavirus caused airlines to respond to the unprecedented impact from the pandemic by reducing capacity by 50, 60 even 90 percent in some cases and securely parking hundreds of aircraft at numerous locations around the world. Capacity was cut dramatically by all airlines around the globe, some suspending service…

Although air taxis in the U.S. are still at least a few years off, small commercial drones – remotely controlled unmanned aircraft – have a strong foothold and their repair and maintenance infrastructure is already taking shape. Driving their growth is their versatility – they are entering applications such as cargo delivery, surveillance, agriculture, oil…

Aircraft MRO work is extremely demanding, dirty, and often difficult, but armed with a growing list of new technology hand tools and accessories, today’s technicians can do their jobs better, faster, and safer. With the rush to go “all-digital” in today’s hangar, it’s easy to overlook just how important basic hand tools, and accessories are…

Jeff Guzzetti is the president of Guzzetti Aviation Risk Discovery (GuARD), an aviation safety consulting firm that he formed following a 35-year career with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other agencies. During his 18 years at NTSB, Guzzetti was a field investigator, “go-team” engineer and Deputy Director. He then…

If you are unemployed and looking for full time employment, you are having the challenge of your business life right now. In this unprecedented pandemic, people are stressed, confused, worried, perplexed and in various stages of emotional overload while the daily influx of more bad news continues. And they are worried about losing their job…

A T-shirt definition of the word “helicopter” reads that the aircraft is: “A million parts rotating rapidly around an oil leak waiting for metal fatigue to set in.” While it may be a bit of an exaggeration, there are few machines in the world with so many rapidly spinning components—components that, when they spin erroneously,…

In their highly regulated environment MROs often rely on paper to document compliance to the authorities and job performance to customers. Some paper documents are required by regulators, and paper is the preferred medium of some lessors and customers. But now environmental as well as business concerns point toward paperless. IATA is calling for paperless…