Building-up an Aircraft Reliability Program: An Application of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
| Keyword | Aircraft; Aircraft Components; Aircraft Maintenance; Aircraft Structure; Aircraft Systems; Fish-bone Diagram; FMEA; Helicopter; Reliability; Rotary Wing; Standard Deviation |
| Authors | Victoria J.F.C., Prasetyo Y.T., Chuenyindee T., Persada S.F., Nadlifatin R. |
| satria.fadil@binus.ac.id | |
| Published Year | 2022 |
Abstract
The paper is about the study of building a Reliability Program for the Leonardo AW139 Fleet of
a start-up company that is based in the Middle East. The start-up helicopter company started
its operations in 2018 with an initial fleet of 2 AW139 and grew to 10 helicopters in 2021 and
is expected to have a total of 30 to 40 AW139 in the next 5 years. All helicopters purchased
were brand new except for the first two helicopters that were leased from another company,
hence, the initial maintenance did not require a reliability program. However, in the last 3
years, the fleet slowly accumulated system, component and/or structural defects and findings
that prompted the Continuous Airworthiness Department to build a reliability program in
anticipation and preparation to revise and update the maintenance program, as applicable, for
the upcoming aircraft. A historical data from 2020 to 2022 was collected and computed for the
standard deviation multiplied by 3 for the aircraft system, component per ATA chapter and
structural defect’s upper control limit or alert level. This will be determined and analyzed per
1000 flying hours to provide a reliability report, mitigation and corrective action to improve
the maintenance reliability of the fleet. Moreover, the study will research for other monitoring
and/or data collection apart from the current practice to be able to obtain more data and have
a better projection in the reliability report that will also cover the on-time-performance of the
aircraft. Fish-bone diagram and FMEA will be used to determine the root cause and provide
potential solutions based on the trend monitoring of the defect rate. Apart from the study, the
other objective of the paper is to present it to the management of the start-up helicopter
company and be able to utilize this as basis or foundation of the actual Reliability Program of
the company. © 2022 ACM.