The quarterly man-hour plan review: a 90-minute agenda that keeps you compliant

AMC1 145.A.30(d) doesn't just ask for a man-hour plan — it expects that plan to be reviewed and updated, and the industry standard reading of that is quarterly. In audit after audit I've watched the same scene: the surveyor asks for the last four review records, and the organisation produces four signatures on an unchanged document. That's not a review. That's a ritual. Here's the agenda that turns ninety minutes into an actual re-forecast — and the worked math for what it should catch.

01Why the signature-only review fails you

A man-hour plan written in January is built on three assumptions: the fleet's utilisation forecast, the check schedule that forecast implies, and the productive hours per engineer you'll actually get. By the end of Q1, all three have moved. Aircraft fly more or less than planned, a 600h check slides six weeks, two engineers resign and a third goes on long-term sick. The annual document still says "compliant" while the roster underneath it is quietly breaching the 25% deviation trigger — the point where, under AMC1 145.A.30(d), the plan stops describing reality and needs formal revision, not just a noting signature.

The quarterly review exists to catch that drift while the fix is still cheap: a contractor booking, a shifted check slot, an adjusted leave approval. Miss two quarters and the only fix left is a slipped input date.

02The five inputs to bring to the room

Ninety minutes is enough if nobody is hunting for data during the meeting. Before the review, collect:

• Logged man-hours, last quarter — actual hours charged per work order, split scheduled vs. unscheduled, per month. Not payroll hours: task hours.
• Updated utilisation forecast — the CAMO or operator's current flight-hour projection per tail, version-stamped. If it hasn't changed since January, ask why.
• Revised check calendar — every check date re-derived from current hours/cycles, not the January calendar with hopeful annotations.
• Actual availability — productive hours per engineer last quarter after leave, training, sickness and other absences. Compare against the plan's assumption (typically ~1,300 productive hours/year per engineer).
• Roster changes in flight — resignations, new hires and their pipeline stage, authorisations gained or expiring, contractor commitments.

03The worked Q3 example

A five-aircraft AW139 operator planned 2026 on 60 FH/month per aircraft — 3,600 fleet hours a year, roughly 10,400 man-hours/quarter of maintenance workload against 7 engineers producing ~1,600 hours/quarter each after the availability waterfall (11,200 available). Comfortable on paper.

Both dials moved at once — demand up 26%, capacity down 11% — and the coverage ratio collapsed from 1.08 to 0.76. Neither movement alone would have breached the plan; together they need roughly 3,090 man-hours, i.e. about 2.2 additional engineers, from Q4 onward. A signature-only review misses this because each number, looked at in isolation, "sort of" matches the plan.

04The 90-minute agenda

• Minutes 0–20 — Deviation check. Planned vs. actual man-hours per month, per license category. Flag any month past ±25% and record the cause in one sentence: utilisation, findings growth, or availability.
• Minutes 20–40 — Re-forecast. Re-derive next quarter's workload from the fresh utilisation forecast and revised check calendar. Recompute required headcount with the measured productive-hours figure, not the January assumption.
• Minutes 40–60 — Gap actions. For each shortfall, assign exactly one action with an owner and a date: contractor engagement, check-slot negotiation with the CAMO, leave-window adjustment, or an accelerated authorisation.
• Minutes 60–75 — Forward look. Check the quarter after next: overlapping checks, training-pipeline arrivals, vacation windows. The cheapest fixes live two quarters out.
• Minutes 75–90 — Record. Write the review note: inputs, deviations found, actions, owner, next review date. If the plan is revised, version it. This note is the audit evidence.

05What the surveyor wants to see

The audit question is never "did you meet quarterly?" It's "show me a review that changed something." One review record with a deviation found, an action taken, and a versioned plan update is worth more than four clean signatures. If your last four reviews genuinely found nothing, that is itself a finding — it means the review isn't recalculating anything.