Aviation Maintenance Research Articles

Applying Lessons from Safety-II Proof of Concept in Line Operational Safety Audit to Aviation Maintenance

Maintenance safety culture is a topic that continues to arise. There is much information in many different literature sources that discusses measuring, analyzing, and scrutinizing data to determine if a safety culture exists in an organization and how to improve it. Currently, aviation maintenance personnel are surveyed for their opinions on how safe their culture is. However, this may not be an adequate reflection of the safety culture or help maintenance personnel conduct their jobs. Typically, they are operating in an environment that has a central determination of what safety culture is. Other programs in other fields have attempted a decentralization of control to guide employees to adapt to variation in the environment and safely achieve their job requirements. A proof of concept is being tried in the commercial airline industry with university support. The results could be expanded beyond the flight deck and into aviation maintenance with further research into how Safety-II has been successfully applied to other industries.

Human Factors in Civil Aviation Maintenance

In civil aviation maintenance in my country, a series of problems caused by human factors are becoming more and more serious, which poses a serious threat to the development of civil aviation in my country. For this reason, this article introduces the theory of human factors, statistics the causes of civil aviation maintenance human factors errors in the past ten years, proposes countermeasures to prevent aviation maintenance human factors errors, and strives to reduce the occurrence of aviation maintenance human factors errors.

Fatigue in Aircraft Maintenance Technician Schools

Fatigue has long been identified as a human factor in aviation. Subsequently, a series of studies have highlighted fatigue-related elements within the context of the aviation industry, focusing on the flight deck – with some extension to flight students – and aviation maintenance activities. However, the latter has not been as deeply examined as its flight crew-centered counterpart. Similarly – if not more significantly – fatigue experienced by aircraft maintenance technician (AMT) students is scarcely explored, especially in comparison to the research conducted to understand fatigue in flight schools. AMT students are subject to comparable, but not the same, experiences as flight students. Academic-related stress, coupled with the need to accumulate a certain number of hours of instruction, certification and qualification exams, and the careful balance of jobs, academic requirements and expectations, and personal lives are all examples of fatigue-inducing situations faced by AMT students. In the conducted study, exactly these factors were explored, with the goal of better understanding the fatigue levels experienced by aircraft maintenance students, but also the contributing factors thereto and the consequences thereof. With this purpose, AMT students at a specialized school in the United States were surveyed with respect to their opinions on, and experiences with, fatigue. A total of 72 responses were analyzed, which indicated that fatigue and tiredness are factors of interest within the context of AMT educational programs. While the participants indicated overall healthy lifestyle patterns and adequate stress and work-life balancing mechanisms, commitments outside of the classroom, the schedule of classes, and course attendance requirements were identified to contribute to students’ fatigue levels. Consequently, reports of students falling asleep in class together with fatigue-induced errors/mistakes were identified among the responses. Nevertheless, the participants indicated to be aware of the safety issues created by fatigue and noted that their learning was not detrimentally impacted by their levels of fatigue. The results obtained form a basis for future research efforts, highlighting areas that are of specific interest for future studies with the goal of improving the educational experience for future aircraft maintenance technicians.

A Cross-sectional survey on workplace-related difficulties among glaucomatous personnel in aviation maintenance tasks

Introduction: Quality of life and work are affected in glaucoma patients due to their disease or treatment. Many papers have identified factors that may affect the life of glaucoma patients. There is no assessment of personnel employed in aviation maintenance tasks suffering from glaucoma at the workplace to the best of our knowledge. Methods: A total of 63 personnel working in aviation maintenance tasks diagnosed with glaucoma were requested to fill a pro forma consisting of 20 questions about their vision-related duties. The questionnaire was designed using a standard technique. The data were entered into an excel sheet and statistically analyzed. Results: About 15.9% had visual problems mainly at night, 4.8% had difficulties walking on uneven ground, 7.9% had difficulty viewing objects in the periphery, 1.6% in crossing roads, 6.3% in climbing stairs, none had any problems in color differentiation, and 1.6% had problems while working on aircraft parts. Conclusions: In the present study, the glaucomatous patient might not have any difficulty in carrying out task in aviation industry; however, regular follow-up and close monitoring of the cohort is required to confirm the findings of the study.

An Inductive Approach to Identify Aviation Maintenance Human Errors and Risk Controls

An Inductive Approach to Identify Aviation Maintenance Human Errors and Risk Controls

개인적인 요인이 항공정비사의 안전행동에 미치는 영향

As the domestic aviation industry grows, the aviation maintenance field is also growing rapidly. This change calls for more aircraft maintenance technicians, and interest in safety accidents is also increasing. Individual safety climate indicates the importance of safety in the organization. We expect that three individual factors (training effectiveness, procedure effectiveness, and work pressure) relate to safety behavior in the workplace via individual safety climate. The purpose of this research is investigating the relationship between individual factors and aircraft maintenance technician’s safety behavior. Previous studies related to individual factors were examined for literature review. Based on the previous studies, research model was constructed. Hypothesis was verified by effected data from 305 samples were employed for final survey. The results show that individual factors were meaningful factors to effect perceived safety behavior, and safety knowledge & safety motivation were related to safety compliance & safety participation.

Digital simulation tools in aviation maintainability training

AbstractAviation maintenance needs to be continuously improved for many reasons: flight safety, the health of maintenance operators, and saving time and costs among other reasons. To preventively improve the working conditions, the Maintainability Department—the department designing the maintenance activity in the Technical Design Office—develops and uses simulation tools such as Virtual‐Reality (VR). To improve maintenance, maintainability stakeholders must perform Human Factors analysis through simulation tools. However, the use of VR requires specific knowledge and skills that should be learned by students in the university. The aim of this paper is to study the use of VR as a Teaching & Training tool as well as an Industrial tool in real on‐the‐job cases. Over 2 years (between 2018 and 2020), we have trained and observed 112 students. Two main surveys have been used, the first one at the beginning of the academic year (to better know students' previous experience in VR) and the second survey at the end of the year (to get students' feedback regarding their training year with VR). We have formulated and presented recommendations to apply better inductive‐deductive teaching approaches offering more cases studies and a better understanding of aviation maintenance by students. We have also made recommendations to improve the use of VR, for example, to reduce the discrepancies and inaccuracies between the virtual and real worlds.

Aircraft operators maintenance decisions supporting method

A key element of exploitation processes constitutes maintenance operations and tasks. While being conducted in the proper way, they have a crucial effect on achieving the assumed by aircraft designer and operator goals. Properly conducted maintenance operations allow to meet all the technical objects readiness requirements as well as to achieve desired acceptable risk level. Maintenance system effectiveness might be generally a crucial task for company or entity responsible for the maintenance. In this context, particularly relevant become technical object maintenance procedures and tasks developed by their manufacturers. Experience of the article authors quite early shows the need of the mainte-nance programmes modification. Aircraft manufacturers usually are not so eager to develop and implement mainte-nance programme modifications. Presented situation is very much the case in aviation transport. This was the reason why authors of this article decided to prepare and develop this elaboration which might constitute the assistance and supports complex technical objects users in maintenance decision. The main purpose of this article is to present maintenance decisions’ supporting method for the aircraft operators. This article provides guidelines which include a description of risk in the context of aviation maintenance and introduction of some methodologies, tools and criteria that support identification, analysis and evaluation of risk. Authors included idea, how the aircraft preventive maintenance could be used to mitigate aircraft failure risk during flight operations. It also shows how to adopt and develop effective maintenance program using tools for adequate risk analysis, optimal interval assignments, and selection of the most effective maintenance task. Authors presented methodology and de-scribed steps of the logic diagram analysis for the aircraft systems and their components, in order to manage and adopt aircraft maintenance program to fulfil aircraft airworthiness requirements and operational availability. The whole methodology was described on the basis of the F 16 aircraft maintenance system and with reference to the maintenance data. This article might also constitute an introduction to the aircraft maintenance programme development method.

Aviation maintenance technician scheduling with personnel satisfaction based on interactive multi‐swarm bacterial foraging optimization

Aviation maintenance technician scheduling with personnel satisfaction based on interactive multi‐swarm bacterial foraging optimization

Off-stage Heroes: The Antecedents and Consequences of Job Passion among Civil Aviation Maintenance Crew

ABSTRACT Objective: The main goals of this study are to identify the possible factors that may affect the level of passion that aircraft technicians have for their job and how job passion may lead to safety motivation.Background: Aircraft maintenance technicians play an essential role in ensuring flight safety since they are obligated to carry out critical responsibilities related to maintaining flight devices. However, the significance and professionalism of civil aircraft technicians tend to be underestimated due to limited academic discussion of job-related issues. In practice, the particular job characteristics and working environment have led to various job demands and requirements for job resources, which may be related to the level of passion of the aircraft maintenance crews.Method: Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the empirical data collected with the questionnaire survey. The sealable stamped addressed envelopes were attached to guarantee for the innominate approach, and a total of 411 usable samples was returned.Results: Significant relations found between work-family conflict, professional development and job passion in the expected directions, while non-significant results were presented between work-load, social support, and job passion. In addition, job passion significantly and positively related to air technicians’ safety motivation.Conclusion: Aircraft technicians undertake their workload without responding to it in a significantly negative manner, unless the designated work causes work-family conflict. A vision of career development is crucial to continuously elevate job passion in these individuals. Passionate aircraft technicians are motivated to contribute to aviation safety.

저가항공사 광고속성이 승객들의 항공사 위험지각과 재이용의도에 미치는 영향

The aim of this study is to find out how airline advertising attributes affect passenger risk perception. Based on existing research in other fields, the research was conducted and analyzed by combining the advertising characteristics and risk recognition of low-cost airlines. We used AMOS and SPSS to analyze the data and the results are as follows. First, the higher the level of aircraft aging that passengers feel, the greater the risk recognized by passengers. Second, the lower the level of aviation maintenance, the greater the risk of passenger recognition. Third, the hypothesis stating that the smaller the perceived risk, the greater the intention to reuse it was adopted. On the other hand, pilot, fatigue, cabin crew training and image, and airline safety policies were not statistically important and were not adopted.

Importance of English Language in Aviation Maintenance: A Malaysia Case Study

Importance of English Language in Aviation Maintenance: A Malaysia Case Study

Reviewing the Challenges in Maintaining the Reliability and Accuracy of IOT Systems for Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Internet of things (IoT) has been implemented in aviation predictive maintenance in recent years for the enhancement of better maintenance prediction, to reduce downtime, unnecessary maintenance actions, increase safety, increase system readiness, and refine the management process and to improve component design. The IoT system in predictive maintenance is very optimistic in gathering and analysing, predicting the component failures and to determine the remaining useful life of a systems. Since Remaining useful life of an system is defines as the length from the current time to the end of its useful life. Due to its futuristic increasing demand of IoT in aviation maintenance, the biggest challenge is to ensuring the reliability and accuracy of any specific IoT system allotted for monitoring aircraft components in the near future. Hence, this review paper clearly explains the challenges associated with IoT systems on predicting Remaining useful life.

Research on Substitution of Fasteners in Commercial Aircraft Production

The necessity of fastener substitution research in commercial aircraft production is analyzed. The principle of substitution of fasteners for commercial aircraft is analyzed from the perspectives of civil aviation regulations, technical requirements, operation and maintenance requirements, economic benefits, etc., and common fastener substitution scenarios are taken as examples to illustrate the positive effects of fastener substitution. The analysis believes that the reasonable application of fastener substitution in the production of commercial aircraft can effectively increase the production rate of the aircraft, and will have less impact on aircraft operations and maintenance.

Human Error Evaluation Model of Civil Aviation Maintenance Based on Grey Wolf Optimizer

Today, with the rapid development of science and technology, human error has already surpassed mechanical failure and become the most important factor in safety accidents. In order to reduce the occurrence of human error in civil aviation maintenance, and to improve the quality of maintenance production, four levels and 18 factors affecting human error in civil aviation maintenance are proposed in this paper,Taking Hongqiao base of Eastern Airlines as an example, a questionnaire survey was used to collect data,and an Inertial Adaptive Hybrid Gray Wolf Optimization (IAHGWO) was proposed,which combined with particle swarm optimization (PSO) and three improved strategies,and an evaluation model was constructed to use IAHGWO to train BP neural network. The results show that the evaluation model has good practicability and accuracy.

Applications of deep learning in big data analytics for aircraft complex system anomaly detection

Big data analytics with deep learning approach have attracted increasing attention in transportation engineering, involving operations, maintenance, and safety. In commercial aviation sectors, operational, and maintenance data produced on modern aircraft is increasing exponentially, and predictive analysis of these data is an exciting and promising field in aviation maintenance, which has a potential to revolutionize aerospace maintenance industry. This study illustrates the state-of-the-art applications of deep learning in big data analytics for predictive maintenance and a real-world case study for commercial aircraft. A Long Short-Term Memory network based Auto-Encoders (LSTM-AE) is proposed for complex aircraft system fault detection and classification, which makes use of the raw time-series data from heterogeneous sensors. The proposed method uses nominal time-series samples corresponding to healthy behavior of the system to learn a reconstruction model based on LSTM-AE framework. Then the system health index (HI) and fault feature vectors are derived from the reconstruction error matrix for fault detection and classification. The proposed method is demonstrated on a real-world data set from a commercial aircraft fleet. The typical PCV faults as well as the 390 F sensor and 450 F sensor faults due to sense line air leakage are successfully detected and distinguished based on the extracted features. The case study results show that the computed HI can effectively characterize the health state of the aircraft system and different fault types can be identified with high confidence, which is helpful for line fault troubleshooting.

Virtual Simulation-Based Training for Aviation Maintenance Technicians: Recommendations of a Panel of Experts

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">A well implemented and suitable training plan makes a company's operations more effective. In the aviation industry, qualified maintenance technicians are one of the most significant assets to improve safety of passengers and reliability of air transportation. This paper investigated the effectiveness of virtual simulation-based training in the aviation maintenance. It garnered data from a panel of experts to discover if virtual simulation-based training can be used instead of the traditional training techniques to train maintenance technicians. From the aviation industry in Saudi Arabia, 11 experts were selected and interviewed. Experts were asked 9 questions seeking their opinions on utilizing the virtual reality technology on the aviation maintenance training, and if it can overcome the limitations of utilizing traditional methods while providing the needed skills. The panel of experts agreed that this technology is an efficient, practical, and doable method to be used in the aviation maintenance training. It provides a risk-free technique to train technicians. However, they stated that this technology should be used in combination with the traditional training methods to avoid potential problems and limitations, such as lack of equipment, time consuming, and exposing trainees to dangerous situations when using the traditional methods, and to avoid challenges, such as information technology (IT) infrastructure, high cost of implementation, lack of accountability, and more importantly, not offering a real sense of equipment when using the virtual reality technology. Therefore, the panel of experts recommended that this technology should be used as a Recurrent Technical Training (RTT) for maintenance technicians who already received an Initial Technical Training (ITT) using traditional techniques, hands-on training, for instance.</div></div>

Aviation Workforce Development Grant Program—Aviation Maintenance (DOT)

Federal Grants & ContractsVolume 45, Issue 5 p. 6-6 Grant Alerts Aviation Workforce Development Grant Program—Aviation Maintenance (DOT) First published: 01 February 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/fgc.31546Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume45, Issue54 February 2021Pages 6-6 RelatedInformation

Building a blockchain for aviation maintenance records

The objective of this paper was to create a proof of concept for a blockchain application in aviation world, with an emphasis on improving the aircraft maintenance traceability. It is well known that aviation industry manages incredible complex systems, where failure is not an option. This industry needs blockchain technology not only for safety improvements but also for a new business model where airline companies can deliver more trust and more transparency to their customers.Nowadays, the passengers who are the end customers, cannot evaluate an airline company from the point of view of fleet maintenance. Bad or uncomplete maintenance are premises for an undesired accident. Moreover, aircraft investigators and auditors are experiencing difficulties in understanding how an aircraft was operated. Thinking of forecasting defects, models of predictive maintenance cannot be developed if accurate data are not available. All these can be changed with the implementation of the proposed blockchain application.Beside the theoretical explanations, the scope of this work was also to put in practice the main blockchain features and develop on a small scale, a real decentralized blockchain application using Python programming language. The script was designed to run on a localhost machine and store maintenance records and relevant parameters for the process of tracking an airplane’s lifespan in a chain of interconnected blocks.Therefore, the traditional approach in the data management is no longer an option for the aviation industry.

Overcoming Challenges in English for Aviation Maintenance: Technical Publications Selection for the Construction of a Corpus and Its Use to Teach Language Aspects Considering Learners Needs

Aviation English and Corpus Linguistics have been put together and focused by some investigations especially those regarding Aeronautical English (the language used between pilots and air traffic controllers in international radiotelephony communications). However, English used in aviation maintenance, specifically in written documents, has not been as much researched. This paper briefly explains the main concepts considering Aviation English and pre- sents—based on previous researches—aircraft maintenance professionals’ needs and regulatory agencies’ requirements related to language proficiency. Afterwards, it summarizes information about the most important technical publications for aircraft maintenance and describes the compilation of the Corpus of documents related to aviation maintenance (CoDoRAM). At the end, some ways the corpus can be used to teach vocabulary and grammar in English are pointed out. Although corpus compilation and analysis have been proved to be valuable for research and instructional purposes, most of publications encompass English for academic purposes teaching context. For that reason, this is a way to inspire new projects related to English used in aviation maintenance and the use of corpora in English for specific purposes classes.