Flying Spanner: When You Need an Engineer On Board, and When You Do Not

What the role actually covers

• Pre-flight, daily and transit checks at each stop along the route
• Troubleshooting and rectification of defects arising en route, within the scope of the applicable approval
• Liaison with the maintenance organisation and the CAMO on anything that cannot be closed on the spot
• Assessment of whether a finding permits continued flight, and on what basis
• Recording of work carried out so the aircraft's records stay straight

The certification point — and its limits

This is where precision matters. An engineer travelling with an aircraft can only certify work that falls within the privileges of the approval they are working under, on a type for which they hold the appropriate authorisation. The release is made under an approved maintenance organisation's approval — in our case Spectrum Technics, under its own EASA Part-145 approval and its other approvals — not simply because an engineer happens to be present.

Scope also depends on the aircraft's state of registry. An engineer authorised for one register is not automatically authorised for another, and that has to be established when the trip is scoped, not discovered at the first technical stop.

When the cover earns its cost

• Multi-sector ferries, where each additional stop is another opportunity for a delay
• Routes through stations with no support for the type, or with no maintenance presence at all
• Older aircraft, or aircraft with a known deferred defect list
• First flight after a period of storage or prolonged parking
• Delivery and redelivery flights, where a technical finding has contractual consequences
• Any operation where a day on the ground costs more than the engineer's presence for the whole trip

When you probably do not need one

Not every ferry warrants it, and it is worth saying so. A short single-sector positioning flight between two stations that both have type support, on an aircraft in current service with a clean technical log, is unlikely to justify the cost.

The useful question is not whether an engineer on board is a good idea in principle — it usually is — but what the realistic exposure is on this route, with this aircraft, at this point in its life. That is a conversation worth having before the quote, not after the delay.

How it is arranged

In practice the engineer, their positioning and travel, and the technical cover are scoped alongside the flight itself and quoted in the same Pro-Forma Invoice, rather than contracted separately. Spares, consumables and tooling likely to be needed are identified in advance and either carried or forwarded to the right station.

The point of the arrangement is that the crew, the dispatcher following the flight and the engineer are all working to the same plan, under one point of contact.