IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE AVIATION INDUSTRY

Impact of Technology in the Aviation Industry

Impact of Technology in the Aviation Industry

For Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to provide public with the safe and reliable air transport is important to have an aircraft inspection and maintenance system sound (FAA, 1991). This system inspection and maintenance is complex with many humans to each other and components of machine, with human's vital element. Recognizing this role of human person, FAA under National Plan for Aviation Human Factors has conducted human factors research. In area of maintenance this research has focused on inspector of aircraft and aircraft maintenance technician (AMT). However, since it is difficult to completely eliminate errors, continuing with emphasis that is needed to develop interventions to inspection and maintenance procedures more reliable and / or more fault-tolerant, especially in General Aviation Organization (AG) of industry given its geographical dispersion of the wide range of aircraft.

In GA environment, aircraft maintenance are initially programmed by the team that includes FAA, aircraft manufacturers and operators to start up, although these hours may be modified to suit individual needs and comply with regulatory approval. In many cases customer can follow program of the manufacturer of inspection, which usually requires the 100 hour and annual inspection) In these times, there are checks at various intervals, often referred to as line checks of flight, controls during night, and, B, C, D checks. Aim of these is to perform both routine maintenance and non-routine aircraft. This includes scheduling maintenance repair known problems, replacement of items after some air time, number of cycles or calendar time, repair of defects discovered before, for example, reports logged by pilot and crew, line inspection, or previous deferred maintenance, and make scheduled repairs.

One of areas reported on need for improvement in this maintenance process is human inspection of aircraft, as this aspect has been widely reported as the cause of various errors and accidents in aircraft maintenance industry. This problem has been attributed to lack of well-defined control procedures for use by aircraft maintenance industry. In response, industry has developed ad-hoc measures and general guidelines to assist staff involved in inspection process, leading to various organizations develop their own internal procedures, which vary in their level of instruction / detail. Because of this situation, inspection procedures are not standardized in industry. On other hand, often not based on sound human factors design.

This situation is further complicated by two potentially conflicting objectives to be achieved through the program of maintenance / inspection, safety and profitability. While former is of paramount importance, payoff can be realized only when security is achieved economically. For human inspectors, this means that in addition to inspection task, they must be sensitive to efficiency, measuring speed and efficiency, precision measurement, so they can optimize their performance. Relationship between these factors and task performance measures, among others, are shown in Fig. 1.

Fig 1: Factors impacting airplane examination performance

Inspection performance was found to be affected by the variety of factors ranging from size and pace ...