When a Jet Blue airliner with jammed front wheels made a dramatic landing at Los Angeles International airport in September, what the passengers and public didn't know was that Jet Blue has outsourced its heavy maintenance to El Salvador and Canada. Flyer Beware examines the safety and security consequences of the airline industry's increasing reliance on outsourcing airline maintenance. We know that more than half of the 4.9 billion dollars the airlines spend on maintenance is outsourced. Contracting this work has become a common practice in recent years, as major carriers cope with bankruptcies, sharp competition and rising fuel costs. Some carriers in the industry are contracting out more work than others. Frontier, Delta and American outsource less than the other airlines surveyed by the Inspector General of the Department of Transportation (contracting out 33 percent, 35 percent and 42 percent respectively), while America West and Alaska outsource the most in this group (72 percent and 80 percent). According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the major carriers have shed over 100,000 airline jobs in the past five years. It's bad enough that these workers are losing their jobs, but what do these numbers really mean to the traveling public?