The Redundancy of Scheduled and Unscheduled Maintenance

This Note concerns the extent to which aircraft scheduled and unscheduled maintenance are redundant. It investigates the extent to which periodic inspection items on the F-4 aircraft are made visible at the flight line during unscheduled maintenance. The study focuses on inspection tasks behind aircraft doors, and assumes that once a door is removed for maintenance activity the inspection item is visible. Visibility or accessibility for condition monitoring is defined as the frequency of door removals. The total number of removals for each aircraft door was counted, and a probability model was used to estimate the probability that a door would be opened within a given inspection interval. The results of this study indicate that most of the F-4 periodic inspection tasks are accessible for condition monitoring on the flight line during unscheduled maintenance. The Note discusses the implications of these results for inspection policy.