In a hangar at Toulouse-Francazal airport, Airplane teams have been working for months to bring planes put to sleep since the start of the health crisis back into service.

“Many planes had been sleeping on the tarmac for two years already. paint that has become obsoleteèyou. Sometimes the airline no longer exists. When the cabin is not in good condition, some customers prefer to convert the planes into a cargo version to transport parcels ordered on the internet”, describes Alain Gaudon, aircraft general manager.

“Airbus is back on the job market” (Thierry Baril, HRD)

Shortage of aircraft painters

For recovery, Airbus is betting on spectacular rate increases with 65 A320NEO aircraft from the summer of 2023 and studies are underway to aim for 70 to 75 devices per month. The aircraft manufacturer also announced on Wednesday that it was seeking to fill 6,000 positions worldwide in 2022. For its part, Airplane, a family SME with around a hundred employees specializing in painting and MRO services, has just launched a plan recruitment to hire 40 additional employees. The task is arduous and the aeronautical company is faced with a shortage of arms.

“We are looking for ATR aircraft mechanics, it is a very rare skill on the market. In the same way, it is the battle in Toulouse to find candidates who know how to put 4,000 euros of paint on an aircraft without it leaking“, adds the leader.

In this niche, Airplane is in competition with other aircraft paint shops in the Pink City, which are also short of manpower. From June, Christophe Cador, CEO of the sglobal specialist in aircraft paint Satys and also chairman of the Aero-PME committee within Gifas, sounded the alarm.

“Like many aeronautical companies, we are having trouble hiring. Many profiles have turned to other industrial sectors. Some of our employees have also become taxi drivers, launched their foodtruck”, he observed.

Aeronautics: Satys warns of labor shortages for recovery

Physical events to stand out

A situation that pushes subcontractors to compete in imagination to attract new profiles. Last November, Sabena Technics, another major player in Toulouse in aircraft painting, organized an operation “an appointment, a CDI” which has been the subject of communication campaigns on the Le Bon Coin site, Youtube, not to mention poster campaigns in the city of Toulouse and in western Toulouse.

Objective: to hire and offer qualifying training to 40 painters in a few hours of job-dating. “We are not looking for any typical profile, or particular professional experience. We simply want people who are satisfied with their job and who are motivated. Seeing these people will allow us to really assess their motivation, not everything can be done behind a screen”, justified Philippe Rochet, CEO of the Sabena Technics group.

Job-dating organized by Sabena Technics at the end of November in Toulouse (Credits: Pierrick Merlet).

An observation shared by Pierre-Olivier Nau, president of Medef in Haute-Garonne: “You have to redouble your creativity to seduce. Physical events are multiplying. They make it possible to meet candidates and motivate them to join the company.”

A trend that also applies to white collar workers. In mid-December, SII Sud-Ouest organized a job-dating in a model airplane to recruit 200 employees in Toulouse. The engineering company is located close to the offices of Thales but suffers from a lack of notoriety. Beyond the simple maintenance, the recruiters had planned demonstrators of projects carried out within the company based on simulators to validate the flight functions of the aircraft.

At the beginning of February, the tier 1 subcontractor Liebherr Aerospace is planning an event in the presence of group experts at the Aeroscopia museum to unearth around twenty profiles of experienced engineers and managers.

Plane-bashing

These additional supplements will support the increase in production rates announced by Airbus on the A320, but will also prepare the aircraft of the future with the manufacture of electrical equipment and for hydrogen fuel cells. “What the leaders tell us is also an a little mistrust, particularly among young people, regarding the issue of decarbonization of the sector. Some say that the green plane is not balanced enough to embark on this path, whereas precisely the young people recruited will now contribute to the high-speed decarbonization of aviation”, notes Pierre-Olivier Nau.

On the Airplane side, faced with the shortage of external recruitment, the competent managers are betting on in-house training with the creation within one to two years of its own MRO and painting center to ultimately qualify “between 50 and 100 people per year on courses of three to five years”. “This will allow us to be attractive, to make it known that we are training to acquire a profession, but it will also allow usselect those who could clear the top bar within the company”, notes Alain Gaudon.

Aeronautics: Avion wants to open its own painting and MRO training center

A showcase to also let people know that these technical courses can lead to interesting career progressions and rather high salaries. “These trades are undervalued even though they provide access to a good standard of living. A certified mechanic is almost an engineer’s salary! On the painting side, the grid starts with fairly low salaries since the added value is quite low. weak but during the career it is possible to finish foreman of the paint cabin by being very well paid without necessarily having a significant educational background”, he finished.