PSA Airlines Invests In Technical Services Growth

American regional carrier PSA Airlines is developing a new technical services team to drive improvements in its maintenance operations. Mike Irmen, the airline’s new vice president of technical services, spoke with Lindsay Bjerregaard about the best practices his team will deploy to ensure the reliability of PSA’s aging CRJ series fleet.

PSA Airlines carved out technical services into its own department at the end of last year. Could you explain the strategy behind this? What will be the differences between this group and the technical operations group?

PSA is a big airline—it’s 140 airplanes and growing, 700 flights a day and 40,000 customers. There are a lot of airlines, such as the majors, that have a lot more leaders within the tech ops space, but we’re really trying to pay attention to breaking up the big, complex tech ops business. [Technical operations will handle] the day-to-day execution from the maintenance side of the house, and technical services is intended to have a strong engineering focus on reliability and safety. [We’re] making sure we’re driving the actions we need to make sure we’re putting the most reliable product on the line every day for our customers and our crews. With an out-of-production aircraft [PSA Airlines’ fleet includes CRJ700 and CRJ900 aircraft], there are a lot of day-to-day challenges. We need to step up to the plate and make sure that we understand what they are and that we’re solving them for the airline and our customers.

What will you be focused on in your new role leading this group?

It’s to build a best-in-class technical services organization. I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of experiences with Boeing and the OEMs, working for major airlines and seeing and benchmarking other major airlines, so I understand what makes up a good technical services organization. Focusing on that out-of-production aircraft, one of the things that you learn over time is that OEMs are really good at building and designing aircraft, but they don’t see the challenges of a very high-time, later-stage aircraft and understand the kinds of technical issues they run into later in the lifecycle.

You have worked at some major airlines and OEMs. What lessons from that experience do you plan to deploy at PSA Airlines?

[In] designing, building and certifying an aircraft, an OEM is looking for the edge of the envelope and very safety-critical situations—as they should be—but the day-to-day airline operations are very different than that. Tires and brakes, oils, safety cards or things that aren’t in the repetitive nature that the OEMs think about are the airline’s business every day when it comes to tech ops.

One of the big lessons I learned from other airlines is that every operation in the world is very different. You have to truly understand what your operation is, what it’s doing and what it is intended to do to make sure that you match your maintenance program and your reliability analysis to ensure you can put the best product forward from that perspective.

[When it comes to out-of-production aircraft], Boeing has the 757 and 767, which are still operated by a lot of major carriers today, and the operators are smarter on those airplanes than Boeing is. At PSA we need to be the smartest on the CRJ700 and CRJ900 to make sure that we do the right thing for our operation.

You’re now working on building a technical engineering and analyst team for PSA Airlines. Could you tell us a bit about what this team’s focus will be and the types of positions you’re looking to fill?

We’ve got four major roles that we’re going to bring forward, trying to take some of those best practices from all the other majors and making sure we’re setting PSA up for success. The first one is the tech analyst role, which I look at as kind of a super mechanic. [They are] that really smart mechanics who aid in troubleshooting, so returning broken aircraft to service quickly and focusing on the chronic issues that plague these airplanes. I am also looking for the liaison engineering team, comprised of smart engineers focused on our operation who liaise between the OEMs and the technical requirements, but who also make sure we’re doing the right thing for our airline from a repair perspective.

The other roles include tech services engineers who will focus on our top reliability drivers, delays and cancellations, what’s driving our out-of-service events, and making sure we’re hyper-focused on the top issues in order to drive them out of our fleet. Finally, the fleet technical manager role is one that a lot of airlines deploy within their tech services world to interact with pilots, flight attendants, maintenance controllers and routers to make sure we’re providing the best product we can, and also reaching across to other airlines to talk about some of the best practices. One thing that I think is really cool about the airline industry is that nobody should be competing on reliability and safety, so if you can talk to your competitor about safety issues on the same airframe and solve those together, it’s a really powerful tool.

PSA Airlines has recently been developing some new technologies for maintenance. What can you tell us about how technology plays into your team’s road map?

There are a lot of people out there trying to sell artificial intelligence [AI] for this and that. When you walk through O’Hare International Airport, IFS has 400 advertisements talking about AI and things like that. I think that’s really interesting and there’s a future that’s there, but right now [it’s about] making sure we’ve got the fundamentals squared away in lockstep and making sure we're doing airline 101 business every day. I think that’s going to be the biggest needle driver for us in the short-term.

There’s definitely a vision of predictive maintenance and using wireless quick access recorders to ensure that we’re looking at the airplane parameters. There’s a lot that the CRJ actually tells us, and we can take advantage of that operationally to make sure we’re ahead of the aircraft in many cases.