Airlines Maintenance Program Essay Example

maintenance work requires significant expertise of manual workforce as well as advance tools for automatic maintenance.

These processes hover around plans with possible impact being both short term as well as long term with provisions for constant reassessment, re-prioritization and re-allocation of tasks. The tasks have to be prelisted according to the infrastructural and technical issues like the fleet status and the resource available and also extra-technical issues like changed work force and modifications in flight plans.

Considering the technicalities of scheduled maintenance tasks, the processes involving it requires further subdivision according to usage-based scheduled maintenance as well as calendar-based maintenance. The usage based maintenance work is performed after the plane is under operation for a fixed number of hours.

The calendar-based inspections are performed on aircrafts at regular time intervals irrespective of the time of usage. But the maintenance of the aircraft can not be bounded by factors like time and duration of usage. It requires unscheduled maintenance in case of any breakdown or some emergent condition (Anderson, 2002).

The maintenance of an aircraft is perhaps the most important technical work for the commercial airlines all around the world. The very need of maintenance of the fleet compelled the commercial airlines to develop a structured decision logic process for the development of initial scheduled maintenance work.

This scheduled maintenance program was later penned down by F. Stanley Nowlan in the form of the book “Reliability Centered Maintenance” and later this book became the very important reason for the development of the airline maintenance process. The process which is currently being followed by the industry is quite different to the one developed

in the earlier stage when Boeing became the first to form a Maintenance Steering Group or the MSG. The latest version of that good old process is MSG-3R2002.

The upgraded version has its own additions to already existing features of MSG. The MSG-3R2002 boasts of some of the most advance process for interval determination and enhanced procedure for zonal analysis in comparatively older planes with aging wiring concerns.

The general visual inspection (GVI) and detailed inspection (DET) have been now expanded to much broadened scope. The new entry to MSG through this version has been the L/HIRF impact analysis. This is actually concerned with lightning /high intensity radiation field (Anderson, 2002).