The Same Problem as Twenty Years Ago
- Carlo Girasoli
- May 1
- 7 min read
A conversation with Peter van der Horst, independent Aviation Advisor and interim
leader with forty years in senior MRO and airline maintenance leadership.
I asked Peter van der Horst a straightforward question.
Is there anyone in the industry genuinely getting management development
right? Anyone with a sound structure that is actually having a positive effect?
He paused. Not for long. But long enough.
"The fact that I need to think is already not a good sign." |
Peter has spent forty years in senior MRO and airline maintenance leadership. He has held VP roles at Martinair and KLM E&M, served as Managing Director at KLM UK Engineering, and has been named Accountable Manager to EASA, the Dutch CAA, and the UK CAA across multiple organisations. He now runs his own aviation advisory practice and takes on interim leadership engagements across Europe. He has spent four decades watching organisations try, and often fail, to treat people development as seriously as they treat operational performance.
The trap that every operator knows and almost none escapes
The daily operation is always the highest priority. Peter said it plainly:
"Training comes last if you're not careful."
That is not a criticism. It is a description of how high-performance environments work. When it comes to a choice between releasing a manager to attend a development session and keeping them on the line, the line wins. Every time.
The problem is not the decision itself. The problem is that the decision gets
made the same way, every week, for years. And at a certain point, Peter says,
"you look around and there's no one there."
No pipeline of managers who know how to handle a difficult conversation. No one who was taught what to say when a skilled engineer pushes back on a safety call. No one who was shown how to manage performance without triggering a grievance. The development was always the thing that could wait until next week.
Next week never came.
How good people leave, and why they do not come back
COVID removed a layer of experienced engineers from the industry that has not returned. People who were laid off, survived elsewhere, and never came back. Voluntary redundancy packages that looked reasonable at the time turned out to be permanent exits. An already ageing workforce accelerated toward retirement.
What replaced them is a younger cohort with different expectations and, more significantly, far more options.
Peter is direct about this. A young engineer working toward a licence faces a lengthy and often frustrating path. Regulatory changes have made the on-the-job training process more demanding: one mentor, one trainee, task by task, with evidence required at every step. The operational bottleneck that already existed has narrowed further.
If that engineer is constantly frustrated, by the training process, by their manager, by a culture that does not seem to notice them, the calculation is simple. A competitor in the same industry will snap them up if they want to stay in aviation. And if they do not, a Monday to Friday job with a company van and no unsociable shifts is an easy door to walk through. They will not hang about weighing it up, because they do not need to.
"They finally think: good luck." |
The industry tends to frame this as a recruitment problem. Peter frames it as a retention and development problem that manifests as a recruitment problem.
I spent over twenty years in recruitment, the last five of them across aviation. I know what it looks like from that side of the fence. The same roles, at the same clients, coming back around. Not because the market dried up. Because something upstream kept producing the vacancy. Nobody asked why. The instruction was: fill it again.
And when the talent did not flock to certain clients, there was a reason for that too. Word of mouth in a sector this tight-knit travels fast and sticks. Engineers talk. They know which organisations look after their people and which ones do not. That reputation, good or bad, is already priced into how hard your next hire will be.
The promotion problem
Across almost every operationally intensive sector, the same pattern plays out. The best performer in the department gets promoted to run it. It is a logical reward for individual contribution. It is also how organisations end up with managers who were never developed to manage.
I have seen it across sectors. The best salesperson becomes sales manager. On the manufacturing floor, the operator who never misses a target becomes the shift supervisor. In MRO, the pattern is no different. The assumption in every case is the same: reward performance with responsibility.
The problem is that technical excellence and managerial capability are not the same thing. Managing people is a fundamentally different skill set. Being exceptional at the job does not automatically equip someone to handle conflict, manage performance, or develop the people they work with.
82% of managers enter their role with no formal training. (CMI/YouGov, 2023, 4,500 UK workers and managers.) That statistic is not specific to aviation, but aviation does not get an exemption.
What follows the promotion is usually a two-day workshop at some point in the first year, if you're lucky. And something close to 70% of what is learned in a training event is forgotten within 24 hours [Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve].
The manager goes back to the line. The behaviour does not change. And nobody is surprised.
What Peter has seen work
None of what Peter describes as working is complicated. That is probably the most frustrating part of it.
When Peter was leading KLM UK, he brought in an experienced HR Director with a clear brief: build a people strategy, and build it properly. What that collaboration produced was not a programme or a platform. It was a set of principles that Peter says he still uses today, years later, across every engagement he takes on.
The core of it is straightforward. Genuine attention for your people. Show your face on the work floor. Have a conversation that is not about work. Make sure people know that whoever is at the top of the organisation is interested in what they are thinking and what they are doing.
Peter's view is unambiguous: people are the engine of aircraft maintenance. A belief he has built operating models around, repeatedly, across different organisations and cultures.
The results were measurable, and none of it required a significant budget. What it required was senior commitment, consistent and sustained, in an environment that constantly offered reasons to deprioritise it.
The cost that is already being paid
MRO is a margin business. Peter put it bluntly: take your car to a BMW dealer, or whatever car you drive, and you will pay roughly twice the man-hour charge-out rate that an MRO bills for the same labour. Aviation maintains some of the most complex machinery on earth, and it charges less for the privilege than a franchised car dealer. And there is always an MRO willing to undercut on price. That squeeze is part of why investment in manager development never quite makes it to the top of the list. It feels like overhead in an environment that cannot afford overhead.
But Peter's argument, and the argument the data supports, is that the cost of not developing managers is already being paid. It shows up in absence rates. In attrition. In the engineers aviation lost to other industries offering better hours and a company van. In the OJT backlog that now requires an interim to fix. In the experienced knowledge that walked out the door during COVID and did not return.
The absence numbers make the case. The UK average is 8.3 working days lost per employee per year, rising to 9.4 days in the most recent CIPD data (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), the highest in fifteen years. CIPD identifies management style and heavy workloads as the top two causes of stress-related absence, cited by more than three quarters of organisations. There is a direct line from how a manager behaves on a Tuesday morning to what shows up in your absence report at the end of the month.
The attrition picture is sharper still for the roles that keep an MRO running. Contracted mechanics and sheet metal workers, the people with the most portable skills and the least structural reason to stay, are leaving at rates between 15 and 22%. Every one of those exits carries a recruitment cost, a productivity gap while the role is covered, and a ramp-up period before the replacement is fully effective. In a sector already running on tight margins, that is a cost the business is paying repeatedly without ever connecting it back to the management environment that contributed to it.
"If you treat your people well, they will work hard. And you don't need to convince them about efficiency or on-time performance. They know. They're not stupid." |
The data exists in every business. It is just rarely connected back to management development and investment. The absence numbers, the attrition figures, the productivity gaps: they sit in spreadsheets that nobody has traced back upstream to the managers who were promoted without training and supported without structure.
It is what frustrates HR Directors, People teams, and L&D leads most. The information is there. What is missing is visibility: a way to surface which managers are struggling, in which specific areas, and in what order those gaps should be addressed. Without that, every intervention is a guess. You end up putting the same two-day workshop in front of everyone and hoping something lands. The organisations that will close this gap are not the ones that spend more on training. They are the ones that start making data-led decisions about where the management capability problems actually are.
"The pressure is already there. Not everyone wants to see it." |
The same problem as twenty years ago
I asked Peter whether the industry's approach to developing managers had
changed in his experience.
"That hasn't changed there, Carlo." |
He said it without frustration.
The pattern he describes is one he has watched repeat across enough organisations to know it is structural, not accidental. Operational priority wins, development waits, and at some point a crisis arrives. The organisation goes into survival mode. And the real problem, the one that was there before the crisis and will be there after it, does not get solved.
Peter is a firm believer in a principle he attributes to Richard Branson: "If you take care of your people, your people take care of your customer. And it is that simple."
It is that simple.
What is not simple is creating the conditions that allow that principle to hold in practice: the senior commitment, the consistent presence, the data to make the case when operational pressure inevitably pushes back.
Most of the industry knows the principle. Very few are able to prioritise it consistently.
Peter van der Horst is an independent Aviation Advisor and interim leader. He reviewed this article before publication. If you are trying to make this case internally and need data to do it, I am happy to talk. Details in the comments.
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