Premier Aviation looks to hire technicians
Inability to find airframe experts costing money
Despite hundreds of former Aveos Fleet Performance Ltd. aircraft maintenance workers still unemployed, Premier Aviation Overhaul Centre is advertising heavily for licensed airframe technicians it insists it cannot find.
That inability has cost the company business it had to turn away, said Dave Diggle, Premier Aviation vicepresident of marketing, sales and service.
“It’s a challenge for the aviation industry these days. Everybody’s advertising for people and the pool is getting smaller and smaller.”
“We’re not looking for (just) a handful of people. Given the opportunity to hire a significant number of people, we would take that opportunity,” said Diggle, who declined to be more specific.
The company is based in Trois-Rivières and has become a large player in the Canadian aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul industry.
About 1,800 Aveos workers lost their jobs last March at the company, which worked almost exclusively for Air Canada. Of those, roughly between 500 and 600 were licensed airframe technicians, said Diggle, a figure with which International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) union representative Georges Bujold concurred.
“More licensed technicians, the people of interest to us, were taken up by Bombardier than we would have liked,” Diggle said. “And Bombardier, of course, is closer for Montreal residents than Trois-Rivières.”
Licensed airframe technicians work on the structure and systems of an airplane.
The Bombardier employee who keeps the record for new hires was not immediately available Monday. But soon after the bankruptcy last March, Bombardier had taken on 75 former Aveos workers for various projects, including the CSeries.
Bujold said that probably hundreds of former Aveos licensed airframe technicians were still looking for a job, and were not inclined to work at Premier Aviation for various reasons.
“It’s a relocation, basically. Those who did go there stay for five days and come back home on weekends. They live four or five guys per apartment and carpool.”
“I mean, unless you’re at the end of your career and intend to retire in TroisRivières, it’s too far.”
David Chartrand, directing business representative for IAMAW who is trying to unionize the Trois-Rivières facility that employs about 350, said unless terms are “very, very attractive, it’s going to be very tough for them.
“Things are ramping up at Bombardier, and I know people who have gone to CAE, L3 (Communications), RollsRoyce (Canada), HérouxDevtek and Pratt & Whitney Canada.”
People hired on contract at Premier Aviation have told The Gazette they intended to leave as soon as they could because of the lack of benefits and the travelling time from Montreal plus gas expenses that can reach $200 or $300 a week.
But Diggle said that any contractor agrees to such conditions — and that many asked to be hired as such to give themselves flexibility if something else opens up.
“We would far prefer to hire them as employees (with benefits) — far prefer.”
But Chartrand said that wages “depend from one person to the next. And if you’re paid $22 an hour in TroisRivières, you may actually make more money at $20 an hour and work in Montreal.”
Diggle said that “too many people prefer Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, as opposed to shift work and weekends and so on, which is aviation.”
He conceded driving 300 kilometres a day to and from Montreal “is a challenge.”
But Premier Aviation, he added, has bent over backward trying to accommodate people.
“We’ll allow them to work more hours and fewer days — four days on, four days off, match people so they can carpool, etc. We’re more than willing to entertain any reasonable option, as long as we get our production out of people.”
Bujold, general chairman of IAMAW district 140, which represented the Aveos employees, said some of the 1,800 Aveos workers, including the 600 licensed airframe mechanics, are pinning their hopes for a job on two companies that have picked up some of the bankrupt Aveos assets; Kelly Aviation Centre, a division of Lockheed Martin in San Antonio, Texas, and British firm AJ Walter Aviation, which bought Aveos’s components repair business. Both are hiring.
Air Canada, he added, has also picked up some employees for daily maintenance tasks.
Isabelle Arthur of Air Canada said in an email that “line maintenance currently employs 2,400 people and staffing level requirements have not changed significantly over the past year.
“As positions do become available in the future, we will be looking at former Aveos employees with appropriate qualifications.”
AAR Corp., an MRO in Duluth, Minn., which signed a deal to maintain Air Canada’s 89 Airbus narrowbodies, is also looking for about 60 people, said company spokesperson Chris Mason from Chicago.