Today in Aviation: Richard Ibanga & the Master Timeline That Outlasted Three Aircraft Programs
# A timeline that survived three aircraft programs
When Richard sat down at a folding table in a Lagos hangar in 1998, he was not building a system. He was trying to keep two MD-83 inspections from colliding with a 737 base-check that nobody on the floor had agreed to. He drew a single horizontal line on a piece of butcher paper, taped it to the wall, and wrote one rule above it: every event lands on the line.
That butcher-paper drawing is the great-grandparent of what the industry now calls a Master Timeline. The rule has not changed. Every defect, every approval, every parts-arrival, every shift-handover lands on a single ordered line. The line is the source of truth. Everything else — kanbans, work cards, defect reports, the 8130 packet — is a projection of it.
Why it matters now
Three decades later we are still chasing the same failure mode: parallel systems where each one claims to be authoritative, and none of them agree. The Master Timeline does not solve coordination by adding meetings. It solves it by giving every role one thing to point at when they disagree.
AMTIL's Hangar Side Chat sat down with Richard at the AMTIL hangar last month to talk about the original drawing, the three aircraft programs it outlasted, and what he sees in the AMT shortage today. The full conversation is in the next podcast drop.
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