A Data Driven Approach for Calculating Aircraft Maintenance Inspections Thresholds

One of the definitive ways to reduce the cost of aircraft maintenance, is to plan ahead. As an aircraft gets older it requires more maintenance, just like man and machine, it requires more maintenance to stay healthy and operational.

There are series of structural inspections that require ample preparation which involve several variables including: manpower, ground-time and consumables, which are quantified by cost.

Another issue with structural inspections, is calculating their optimal threshold - when is the proper time to start these costly inspections.

Some of these inspections have complicated thresholds that most Aircraft-Maintenance-Planning-Software are unable to calculate, for example the "Inspection Threshold Boundary cropped corner", shown in red.

In this example, for the cropped corner line there are more than 20,000 different combinations of Flight-Hours and Flight-Cycles, which need to be calculated.

Thus current threshold predictions are hindered by long term maintenance planning constraints, which translate to higher costs in the long run.

The program I developed solves this problem in a completely different way from most of the Aircraft-Maintenance-Planning-Software, using a data-driven approach that is capable of estimating the inspection threshold date. In addition the program provides a Confidence-Level, i.e. estimation error, using statistics.

* The Deviation values are Aircraft Utilization (data) dependent, and may change from aircraft to aircraft.

In this article I tried to address the importance of implementing Data Driven approaches to reduce operational costs of aircraft maintenance, by providing a new method for maintenance planning.