Question

• how are these approaches to maintenance different? the terms unscheduled maintenance, scheduled or preventative maintenance, reliability centered maintenance and predictive maintenance. how are these approaches to maintenance different?
• What factors within the aviation industry have led to the development of predictive maintenance? Identify one potential negative consequence associated with the predictive maintenance approach

Answer 1

Answer-

The difference in these approaches to maintenance can be explained almost exclusively by their definitions. Unscheduled and scheduled maintenance exist together. schedule maintenance, also known as preventative maintenance, is maintenance that is performed after so many hours or cycles of operation has occurred. Its opposite is unscheduled maintenance, this is any maintenance outside of the schedule. Reliability centered maintenance is the practice of only fixing what is broken . The idea is that a component is less likely to fail then it is to be replaced wrong. Meaning it is more reliable to just change bad parts as they fail. Predictive maintenance is built on the same principles of reliability centered maintenance, but with the addition of technology, operators are able to gather mass amounts of information to predict when a part is failing. This means that a company can schedule the removal of components when they are failing, not failed. This greatly increases safety and efficiency as you can push back changing a single failing component until more than one maintenance evolution needs to be completed.

The single biggest factor in developing predictive maintenance is the gathering of data from all over the aircraft. Programs such as Boeings Airplane Health Management (AHM) and Airbus’s Real-Time Health Monitoring are gathering mass amounts of data from their newest airplanes and putting this information into algorithms to find new ways to diagnose problems before they even effect aircraft performance. One potential negative is pushing aircraft components past their limits, thinking they can last longer. If data predicts that a component will fail in 3 weeks and it fails in 1, this can be a major safety concern for passengers.