I have been wondering about the long term impact of all this on airplane maintenance.
Just like the military industrial complex needs ongoing work to maintain it's domain knowledge and tooling, will the maintenance teams responsible for these aircraft end up losing key people, infrastructure and key knowledge during the shutdown?
The maintenance is still happening and it's killing the airlines on costs too. There's one (of several?) small regional airport 2.5hrs north of Toronto where Aircanada parks a dozen large planes from canceled routes. A few times a week a whole crew of maintenance workers and trucks drives all the way up from Toronto, inspects the planes, runs up each engine, then shuts them down, does any maintenance work then drives all the way back to Toronto. Been doing that for 6 months.
Just like the military industrial complex needs ongoing work to maintain it's domain knowledge and tooling, will the maintenance teams responsible for these aircraft end up losing key people, infrastructure and key knowledge during the shutdown?