Like with this for example. How can that possibly be the case?
This is what has been told to me by others more knowledgeable than I so while i can't confirm independently, i can explain the concepts. Catering is a per-flight basis, basis, and is based on contracts, that the airlines will buy x amount of stuff per flight and will buy for a minimum of y amount of flights. The food on the flight has already been purchased for that flight. Additionally everything (and i do meam everything) on a flight must have the FAAs magical bless of "airworthy" to go up in the air, especially in the commercial airline world. To use a small world GA example, the average cessna 172 has an alternator on it. A used one costs about $500, and a new one costs nearlt double that. However, if you want to take a look on its backside, it says in a funny little tag "ford motorcraft company". These alternators are identical to the one off your f150. Now why do they cost anywhere from 5 to 10 times the price? Because of another funny little tag that says "FAA PMA" (federal aviation administration parts manufacturing approval). Because of that we get these absurd prices, and the same concept applies here.
> go into more detail
So as previously mentioned, pay is very crap. I'll expound on that a little bit here.
In the aviation industry there are 4 spheres for mechanics
General aviation (Joe and is 172 he flys, or the local FBO's {an fbo is like the one stop shop/gas station for all activites outside the airlines} king air 90 they charter with)
Corporate aviation (Mr. CEO keeps a plane to fly him from LA to Portland for bussiness stuff)
Manufacturing (you build planes at the plant)
Transport Category (you work for american airlines or FedEx)
The basic dichotomy for these worlds is this.
GA jobs are the most ubiquitous, pay really poorly (see my previous post), have good to ok offtime (you
may not have to work holidays). This means that while they do not pay well, and may not have the best offtime, you can get one nearly anywhere
Corporate jobs a generally regarded as the best in the field. They have a corporate structure rather than maintence structure, so they're often salaried, and you get a pay bump based on your level of education (BS, MS, etc.). You work on the same few airplanes, and and thus can better track problems. Pay is decent(you might start at around 80k or so). You may be on call, but offtime is better and working 3rd shift isnt terribly common. Theyre all over the country since theres CEOs all over the country. The downside is that these jobs are very exclusive, and you not only need good experience to get in, you also have to know people that know people that know people to get in.
Manufacturing i wont go into detail because its basically airlines lite
Airlines are a different beast. Theyre very location specific since big maintenance bases for the airlines are only in select locations. They do pay excellently (in comparison anyway) with great benefits. The down sides are that you have to live near a maintenance base to get an airline job, and they're union. If youre the new guy, youre working holidays for the next 3 years at least (which to be fair you are well compensated for but it still sucks), and youll be on 3rd shift for the next 8.
Theres other smaller niche jobs, but those are too numerous in variety to cover in detail.
As you can see, if you aren't corporate, you dont really have a lot of good options available to you.
Still easily doable right?
Wrong.
You need an A&P liscense to do this work. There are 2 paths to get said liscense.
1. Work as an apprentice under an A&P for roughly 2 ish years, and then he will sign you off to go test
Or
2. Go to an A&P school for a 1 year (8 hours a day) or 2 year (5 hours a day) program, and they will sign you off to go test.
Its not that hard, but it is a substantial barrier to entry into the field. Due to the length, the people that finish it have to be really committed to following it all the way. Now when you tell folks that their committment is going to require them to get paid at a level they could get without all that work, or that they have to immediately move somewhere else to get paid decently (and also have to work crap hours and on holidays), things become far less appealing and thus, we get the mass labor shortage that we see in the field right now. If the largest MRO in the country, which will never not have work to do, cannot be bothered to pay its mechanics well, you know theres an issue.
Cam, of TekamoHD (heavy equipment maintenance channel) was an aircraft mechanic himself, and hes said openly that he left the industry because they didn't pay enough.
When you draw a historical perspective, where the average wage of an auto factory mechanic in the 60s was the modern equivalent of $40 an hour, things only begin to look worse and worse. People begrudge the whole "them darn zoomers aint doing the blue collar jobs, they dont like to work", when the fact of the matter is that those jobs dont pay well for the same work my grandfather did for twice my pay. Why wouldn't i go find a tech job where i do easier work for more money?
Feel free to ask any other aviation industry questions (especially plane ones) and i can try to answer them