The AOG Search: Winning the First 60 Minutes

When an Aircraft Goes AOG, the Search Begins

Jets are widely known to break down at the most inconvenient times and locations. Murphy’s Law always prevails, but it doesn’t change a thing when you are on the ground with a broken-down jet at 2300 hours in an unfamiliar city. 

So, what happens in that first hour? The first 60 minutes set the tone for the rest of the process. The pilot checks in with the DOM, asks what the issue is, and starts working on a solution.   

Time is a commodity they don’t have; they don't have time to browse local MRO websites and compare brand stories. This is not the time for that; they have a breakage, and you need a tech to evaluate it and get a part on order.  

AOG searches are some of the highest-intent search opportunities in aviation (high-value, immediate demand and fulfillment), yet few MROs have a website and local search suite built to capture them. If they did? They would own AOGs for their locale, and it wouldn’t be close. 

Let’s look at how your MRO can be the first call by improving your website and local search presence.  

The DOM needs to know four things right now. 

Can you physically show up tonight? Whether that means a service truck, a tech on a commercial flight, techs on private flights, or a borrowed hangar on the next ramp, the operator needs to know if it is a yes or no, and how it is going to happen. 

How fast is fast actually? Blanket statements of 24/7 service are overblown. If the AOG event is in North Georgia and the AOG techs have to drive up from Florida, well, that isn’t super fast. An actual number they can plan around, because they're making a go or no-go decision on a departure and a passenger bill at the same time.

Do you have the parts on hand, or can you get them quickly? This can be the whole conversation. Are they on the truck, in stock and shippable, or is it a phone call to a parts broker who owes you one (hey, that’s between you two). The owner/operator probably does not care at all; just get the airplane fixed and in the air. 

So, who will you call and who answers? One number, a human being, tonight. 

What is not on the list is pricing, branding, capabilities deck, or years in business. Do you have the part, and can you fix the airplane right now? That is all that matters. 

Listen, nobody in an AOG event is looking for “aviation maintenance services.” That is for booking scheduled maintenance or an STC. AOG plus the component and aircraft type. That’s what your target customer is looking for, because that’s what matters to them right now. 

These search terms are narrow, urgent, low-volume searches, and very few people in the industry are competing for them in a tangible way. A service page optimized for phrases desperate people aren’t searching for won’t end up in the SERPs or on Google Maps at 2345 hours. 

A single page. Line maintenance, heavy checks, avionics, AOG, or maybe all of it. Attached is a contact form promising a response by the next business day. At midnight, one business day might as well be never. The DOM closes the search and calls whatever shop they used that time, and might end up eating 300 miles of transit costs because the local AOG never showed up in any way that could get them hired. 

They were there. They could do the work. They could have a tech there in 20 minutes. But they never showed up in any way that confirmed their capabilities. 

The AOG page has exactly one job on a website: answer the above questions, in that order. Coverage, how you get there, a response time that actually happens, and what you can fix. One phone number that always gets answered, clickable on a phone from a mobile browser, with no form in front of it. 

This is the BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front). 

The pages behind this are where search happens. Component pages, aircraft type pages, individual city pages where you have a physical presence. An indexed structure, not one page pretending to cover an entire continent. 

Then measure it, and get real data. Verifiable data that doesn’t lie. A dedicated tracker on the AOG phone line will tell you exactly what your AOG service page is doing, and it’s the only way you’ll know if it is doing anything at all when that DOM is looking for you late on a Tuesday night. 

Getting a technician to the aircraft is half the night. Releasing the part is the other half, and it's where good AOG responses stall, usually on credit and payment terms rather than availability. I wrote about that separately in The AOG Payment Bottleneck, and it's worth pairing with this piece, because the operator's problem doesn't stop when your tech arrives

The first 60 minutes of AOG events are decided in a search bar, Google Maps, or by phone. Otherwise, it's settled in a DOM's address book. He'll eat the cost of driving them up from another state or another part of the state because he knows they'll show up. That's your competition.

If your operation can't be found and won't answer at midnight on any night of the week, the operator will call someone else. They'll wait three hours and pay 300 miles of transit for a shop they already trust, so the only way to be that shop next time is to be findable the first time. 

That's the whole argument. If you want to see what it looks like pointing at your operation, that's the work I do at Flight Ready Digital.