Maintenance management system for a defence aircraft development programme

Abstract

Design and development of a defence aircraft involves solving of multi disciplinary problems over the development lifecycle. The ground and flight tests evaluation play a crucial role during the certification of the aircraft. The observations from the field trials viz. reported failures and corrective actions taken are of immense value for the performance assessment of aircraft. In addition to the aircraft performance assessment and root cause analysis of the failures, the data from the field also facilitates to assess and refine the maintenance procedures. This paper brings out a conceptual model of computerised aircraft maintenance management system (CAMMS), which is a product lifecycle management (PLM) enabled enterprise–wide solution involving designers, maintenance planners, test pilots, flight test engineers, inspectors and certification agency. This supposed system will encapsulate a framework for failure reporting analysis and corrective action that shall assist in failure, reliability and maintainability analysis, aiding a tighter control on the schedule and budgetary escalation.