After Sept. 11, thousands of U.S. airplane maintenance workers were laid off or forced to take pay cuts. Since then, more than half of all maintenance work in the U.S. airline industry has been outsourced to both foreign and domestic contractors. In general, heavy, labor intensive work is being sent overseas while more technically sophisticated work is remaining in the U.S. Some carriers are now ?insourcing? work from domestic carriers that don?t have their own maintenance crews and from carriers based in Asia, Canada and elsewhere.
See "Airplane maintenance work a source of global exchange", Sara Kehaulani Goo,
The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, June 2, 2004