Airline Maintenance Program in the United States - Literature review Example

Airline Maintenance Program The responsibility of an airline is to securely transport passengers from one place to another. For this purpose airlinesare constantly working with aircraft firms, leading organizations and their maintenance and flight crews to enhance security and performance. Though the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the authority for implementing standards, commercial airlines have the crucial responsibility for its operations and safety aspects. The enduring safety aspects of the airlines depend on mainly on aircraft maintenance and aircraft operations. Keeping in mind the airlines fleets safety and high standard of operating condition the U.S. airlines spend around $10 billion a year. The maintenance program of an airline specifies the period at which aircraft and engine parts to be serviced and inspected. The maintenance centers that carryout inspections and servicing, may be the airlines own work centers or outsourced to other agencies. But these work centers and servicing agencies must be certified by the FAA and provide provision for inspection at all times. Reports of maintenance details on an aircraft are to be kept and made available for FAA appraisal. Depending on the type of aircrafts the airlines operate maintenance programs are made jointly with the manufacturers of the equipment, such as Boeing or Airbus and approved by FAA and other regulatory agencies in countries where the airline operates. The repair and maintenance plan involves a number of multifaceted inspection and maintenance procedures, basing on an aircrafts flying hours, number of landings and takeoffs. Maintenance personnel investigate in detail of the aircraft, taking apart various parts of the aircraft for closer inspection. Every after 12 to 17 months of flying the aircraft is taken up for detailed inspection where the maintenance technicians use advanced sophisticated testing devices to look for wearing out of parts, corrosion and cracks which are not visible to human eye. A major inspection is carried out after every three and a half year to five years where aircraft undergoes major maintenance and assessment of landing gear and many other vital components which needed replacement. During the scheduled maintenance checks, the Centralized Computer on board the aircraft monitors the performance of aircraft systems and displays the details if any abnormalities detected. In latest aircrafts, this information’s can be transmitted to ground servicing centers while the plane is in flight so that the ground technicians can take necessary steps to rectify the snag immediately after landing without loss of time. The people who assigned to carry out work, fly or supervise commercial aircrafts must be approved by the FAA and have certain levels of specific training and knowledge. These requirements are relevant to aircraft mechanics, pilots, flight engineers, flight navigators, aircraft dispatchers and flight attendants. The qualification of candidate who is applying for a job as pilot must have minimum of 1,500 hours of flying hours, including at least 250 hours flying as a pilot in command of an aircraft. Pilots must show their flying talent to an FAA examiner by performing different types of takeoffs and landings, in-flight skills, and emergency procedures, either in actual flight or a simulator. They are also required to pass written exam related to aircraft operations, meteorology, navigation, radio communication and other subjects important to commercial aircraft service. Further they have to undergo and pass medical exam that include psychological and aptitude tests. The airlines conduct various training for pilots, including classroom instruction, training in simulators, hands-on equipment training and the use of self-pacing, self-testing, computerized video presentations and so on. The pilots and flight engineers are needed to complete certain recurring training each year. The typical duty schedule for a pilot can be 250 hours away from the base each month, but a he is allowed 75 to 85 hours of flying time. The ‘rest’ requirements for pilots vary from flight to flight, but a minimum of 8 hours rest between flights is needed. The longer duration flight, such as an international trip, needs longer rest periods. These longer duration flights must have extra crew members. Flight attendants are responsible for the in-flight wellbeing of passengers; over and above make sure passengers have a relaxed journey. Fresh flight attendants must undergo initial training program with syllabus covering aircraft familiarization, emergency procedures and in-flight service. To sustain the expertise they are needed to attend recurring annual training. Flight attendants also are responsible to assist passengers with medical problems and emergencies. FAA approval requirements for first aid training demand instruction in the handling of emergency situations, including illness and injury (boeing.com, N.D.). American Congress has given major responsibility of civil aviation to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Its responsibilities are mainly regulating civil aviation, managing the air traffic control system, performing research and development in airspace safety and security, providing aviation grants to state and local governments and executing plans to manage environmental effects. The FAA is authority for evaluating the design, manufacture and maintenance of all aircraft equipment. Before the FAA certifies an aircraft, a prototype is designed, constructed and tested. Once the prototype is fit to fly, the FAA certifies the aircraft for flight. The FAA also is responsible for setting minimum standards required for crew training, setting up operational requirements for airlines, and performing safety-related study and development. If airlines industry does not meet these minimum requirements, the FAA does not issue operating certificates (Reed and Goehring, 1998). General Aviation (GA) is one of major airline of America’s and a major resource of U.S. financial growth. Its an important part of the U.S. financial system, generating 1.3 million jobs and over $102 billion of total economic movement and a deep influence on the quality of life in the United States. GA’s continued success will further improve American society and the American financial system over the next century. It enhances the competence and efficiency of businesses by reducing the travel time; offers public health services, such as transporting patients and medical equipment; provides public safety services, such as monitoring floods or fires; offers an important transportation link to small communities; and provides training for the majority of all new pilots. General Aviation (GA) in the America is the safest of public air transportation and has an excellent track record accomplished from the stable development in technology and certification standards. In 2005, GA pilots accomplished one more exceptional year of safe flying, with 24.4 million hours of flight operations and only 321 deadly accidents. It is compulsory that all GA aircraft must go through periodic maintenance and inspections after 50 hours of flying and 100 hours of flying or yearly which depend upon aircraft usage. An aircraft’ annual maintenance and inspection can take days to complete because the aircraft is literally taken apart during these thorough inspections so that each part can be inspected and tested. Worn out parts are replaced and settings are made, and improvements or modifications are applied. In certain cases, lubricating fluids are examined in a laboratory while other fluids replace them. After the completion of inspection and all necessary maintenance and repairs are finished it is recertified to assume flight by a designated inspector from the Federal Aviation Administration. All the records of maintenance and inspection are entered into the aircrafts logbooks. All materials, consumables, and parts used to make, repair, and operate aircraft are tested and certified by the FAA. Keeping such a high safety standard of maintenance is expensive, but necessary to keep up the flight safety (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, 1995). Studies indicate that 60 - 80 % of aircraft accidents are caused due to human mistake. Aircraft maintenance and inspection errors have added somewhere from 9 to 23 percent of these accidents. As a matter of fact, just about 20 to 30 percent of in-flight engine failures are caused by maintenance faults. As per an organization’s cost estimate, this can be as much as $500,000 for a single event.  The unscheduled maintenance due to human mistake leads to accidents which cause loss of revenue and precious human lives.  Moderate estimation shows maintenance errors cost commercial airlines in the order of $2 billion per year (SCSI, 2005). Due to fatigue and corrosion of the airframe structure the effects of aircraft aging increased the likelihood of crash and damages. The sustained safe operations of the commercial aircraft depend on the ability to foresee required changes in the inspection and maintenance procedures to compensate for the aging process. There was a belief that commercial aircraft are designed for endless life with proper maintenance. But this confidence to correctly maintain older aircraft considerably reduced since the failure of the Aloha Airlines 737 fuselage in 1988. The FAA constituted the National Aging Aircraft Research Program (NAARP) to tackle this reduced public belief in the airlines ability to properly maintain the older aircraft. The aim of the plan is to ensure sustained airworthiness of the commercial aircraft through upgrading in equipment, techniques, practices, and procedures in aircraft and engine design, repair, maintenance, and inspection (DTIC, 1991). Aging of commercial aircraft has become a most important issue since a lot of older aircraft attain their design life. Aircraft industry world wide and specially NASA and Federal Aviation Administration have already accomplished important methods to evaluate and monitor the aging aircraft, giving importance to corrosion of material, fatigue damage and nondestructive testing methods. This will help to build up enough and correct scientific knowledge such as the aging issues, and can be considered in the future design process. The capability to know and foresee aging processes can have immediate implications for dealing with existing aircrafts. To understand the response of materials for long time exposure in an aircraft structures service conditions, a basic knowledge of the physical occurrence related with damage and failure has to be developed. This can be done only by experimental materials classification and advancement of the related mathematical and computational models. Appraisal of long-term aging responses of materials and structures by means of testing and analytical methods is not easy, particularly for the multifaceted situation encountered in aircraft service. This may not give a satisfactory result of material performance. Still, the new aircraft has to be designed, and materials and structures assessed over their entire life cycle, it is significant to develop testing and analysis methods, which provide the knowledge of materials and structures performance to help materials selection and structural design decisions. Giving importance to these issues, NASA gave instructions to the National Materials Advisory Board (NMAB) to find out issues related the aging of advanced materials and take evaluation process and analytical methods to characterize the durability of the future materials and structures (Starke, et al, 1996). Technology in aircraft maintenance had gradual growth. In late 1940’s and 1950’s civil aviation has shown remarkable growth and in order to reduce the number of failure the frequency of scheduled maintenance was increased. This increased the maintenance costs which led the airlines industry to look at the concept of preventive maintenance policy. A committee including Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of USA and airlines was formed to explore planned maintenance policies and progressed through various evaluation and program development such as Maintenance Steering Group-1 (MSG-1) which was further upgraded to MSG-2. The Air Transport Association (ATA) appraised MSG-2 to include further programs in preventive maintenance and this resulted in MSG-3, the Airline/Manufacturers Maintenance Program Planning Document. Later this is branded as ‘Reliability Centered Maintenance’ (RCM). (maint2k.com, N.D.). Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) can be seen as of reactive, time-based, condition-based, and proactive maintenance practices. This major maintenance approaches, rather than being applied separately, is included to take benefit of their individual strengths in order to exploit capability and equipment reliability while reducing life-cycle costs. RCM includes reactive, time-based, condition-based, and proactive tasks. Further, a user should know system limitations and facility coverage’s, equipment tasks, functional failures, and failure modes, all of which are vital parts of the RCM program. Even though the main objectives of RCM are to reduce the costs related to system breakdown and downtime, there are various other tangible benefits associated with RCM program. (Pride, 2007). The emergence of Centralized Maintenance Computers in late 1988s and early 1990s made major difference in the maintenance field. It receives health status data’s from most airplane systems, combine these results to decide the source of fault, and correlate the source or fault to the technician for applicable maintenance procedure. The CMC can display these results on the Multifunction Control Display Unit (MCDU) or link these results to ground stations while in flight to support maintenance management. The CMC also provides an integrated user interface to perform ground tests on all connected member systems. As an enhancement to CMC design, Boeing and Honeywell introduced the next generation CMC, as a part of integrated avionic suite on the 777 aircraft in 1995. Unlike the previous CMC design Boeing 777 CMC engaged a model based method, in which cause-effect interaction and fault propagation paths were captured in a loadable database, using ground based tools. This technique reduced the effort required to customize the CMC for the specific aircraft (Bird, et al, 2005). The development of Vehicle Health Management (VHM) in the field of commercial aviation has grown through many generations and different types of aircrafts. The health management system consists mainly of: fault discovery and separation; best sensor quality and placement guidelines; standard built-in-test designs and practices; fault coverage percentage or fault separation correctness percentage; confirmation and validation plans and measures; fault representation guidelines, and interface principles between subsystems and central maintenance systems. Organization and incorporation of these methods are the successful vehicle health management. The growth of health management systems shows the progress of avionics architectures. From the B727 to the B777, health systems have supported mechanical/analog, digital, federated and modular avionics. The main difference between the earlier and present maintenance systems was regarding the storage of fault data which depended on the individual member systems LRU/LRM (line replaceable module). In case of the CMCF, it uses local fault storage to store the data, which make easy for the fault reporting interface for the participating systems. The CMCF recovery of fault data is all contained within the CMCF itself. The CMCF was built upon earlier Honeywell maintenance methods which added maintenance message text to maintenance message codes. The goal is to provide maintenance information in clear English text that is usable by the maintenance technician, rather than having a coded message that requires translation (aviationtoday.com, N.D.). The future trend in the field of commercial aviation moves ahead with new technologies continue to be added and explored. Without looking back, they are moved by the need to bring value to the passengers. Numbers of the innovations are based on the present day technologies, for example wireless and internet accessibility, combined together in new ways to offer value added service to customers. In this regard Honeywell is understood well that progresses such as these will support commercial aviation accomplish vital achievements in flight safety, dispatch availability and cost of ownership. As explained earlier aircraft maintenance program for commercial aviation have undergone major development since the beginning of simple Built in Tests (BIT) in the early 1980s. This progress continues with technology advances in IVHM and process advancement such as Sense & Respond. In short, Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) and various other new technologies are going to play a major role in aircraft maintenance program in the future. (Bird, et al, 2005). References Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, (1995) General Aviation, AOPA Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://www.gaservingamerica.org/ aviationtoday.com, (N.D.) 727 to 787: Evolution of Aircraft Maintenance Systems, Avionics magazine, Special Report. Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://www.aviationtoday.com/Assets/Honeywellsmall.pdf Bird, G., Christensen, M., Lutz, D. and Scandura, P.A. (2005) Use of Integrated Vehicle Health Management in the Field of Commercial Aviation Management. First International Forum on Integrated System Health Engineering and Management in Aerospace, November 2005. Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://ase.arc.nasa.gov/projects/ishem/Papers/Scandura_Aviation.pdf boeing.com, (N.D.). Airlines Role in Aviation Safety, Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://www.boeing.com/commercial/safety/airline_role.html DTIC, (1991) Program Plan - National Aging Aircraft Research Program, Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA242891 maint2k.com, (N.D.) What is Reliability Centred Maintenance? Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://www.maint2k.com/what-is-rcm.html Pride, A. (2007). Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) National Institute of Building Sciences. Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://www.wbdg.org/design/rcm.php Reed, J.B. and Goehring, J.B. (1998) The State Role in American Aviation Policy, Transportation Series No. 9, Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://www.ncsl.org/programs/transportation/transer9.htm#con SCSI, (2005) Human Factors in Maintenance Operations, Retrieved on 5 May 2007 from http://www.scsi-inc.com/HFMO.html Starke, E.A. et al, (1996) Accelerated Aging of Materials and Structures: The Effects of Long-Term Elevated-Temperature Exposure, National Materials Advisory Board, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. Read More