Aircraft Reliability Management - ATA25 debacle and its impact on passenger experience
Within the industry monitoring aircraft systems defects by ATA chapters has become the standard on how to monitor aircraft systems reliability. Basically, we monitor the number of pilot reports raised per ATA chapter, maintenance defects raised per ATA chapter and monitor any aircraft delays that can be attributed to certain system malfunctions. This way of monitoring has proven to be effective over time, however, comes with a great limitation. Namely the analyses itself is only as useful as the quality of the data entered by engineers. In this blog we do not focus on aircraft data quality, however if you’re interested to learn more on this, please follow this link: (link to data quality article).
What is happening with ATA25?
Across airlines the monitoring of aircraft systems reliability always shows ATA25 as one of the ATA chapters with one of the biggest numbers of defects being raised. Both by the flight & cabin crew as well as the maintenance engineers. For those of you potentially not that familiar with ATA25, this is the ATA chapter used for Aircraft Equipment & Furnishings. It contains the sub ATA systems for Flight deck compartments, Passenger Cabin compartments, galleys, emergency equipment, lavatories and insulations.
Graph: Avilytics Airline Demo Data – Finding per ATA Chapter
The above graph shows the aircraft systems reliability overview of a typical airline. The information displayed is from a fictive airline, called EXSYN Airlines. More details on the software used for this graph can be found here.
So, does this mean that aircraft interiors are of such a bad quality, does it mean that emergency equipment is constantly failing?
Well it is neither of those. The example of ATA25 being an industry wide commonality of scoring high on aircraft systems reliability analyses is the fact that it are those items most exposed to wear & tear due to usage and least inspected as most of these items (aside from emergency equipment and some flight deck compartment items on pilot and cabin attendant seats) do not impact the actual airworthiness of the aircraft. Not sure about this? Just think of the number of passengers that sit on those seats on a daily bases, use the meal tray, stash their suitcases in the luggage bins, cups of coffee served or the cabin trolleys being pushed in and out of their compartments in a rushed way because the cabin crew still needs to complete inflight sales and its close to landing time... we could make this list go on and on.
Impact on the customer experience
Interestingly enough and mostly due to the fact that airworthiness is not impacted, a cabin restoration is something done as part of a C-check. So roughly every 3 months, give or take the utilization of the aircraft. During this time any maintenance or restoration work on cabin items needs to be done during operational ground times. So, either the aircraft turnaround or typical weekly checks or A-check (or its equivalent defined check). However, with a push for continuous shorter ground times and shorter turnaround time to improve aircraft availability less and less time comes available for such minor cabin restoration works. From a customer point of view this does not make any sense at all as it is the first thing you see when boarding the aircraft and it is one of the things that contributes to passenger experience the most.
What can a reliability engineer do?
A suitable recommended action from reliability engineers in such a case could be to suggest maintenance practices that cater for dedicated cabin maintenance teams that are able to be at the aircraft within its turnaround in order to fix the most commonly noted defects such as curtain rails, seat cushions or tray table fixtures. Indeed, there is no direct cost saving here and it might even slightly increase maintenance costs, however it pays back threefold in passenger convenience and their net promoter score as a customer.
How EXSYN can help
EXSYN's team of aircraft data and aviation experts utilize a proven framework and methodology for adoption of reliability engineering and predictive analytics in aviation. It has been applied to numerous fleets and aircraft and includes:
EXSYN’s pre-build Avilytics environment of analysis modules, widgets, formulas and algorithms on a wide range of ATA chapters and components
Workshops to identify the specific maintenance complaints to be monitored for each fleet operated by your airline
Implementation of identified complaints per aircraft type and registration into the Avilytics environment. Including data mining, validation and user interface design.
Native integration of the Avilytics modules in your own platform or hosting in the myEXSYN.com digital environment in case your airline does not have a data warehouse yet
Training of identified user groups
Adoption workshops to support successful day-to-day usage of the predictive analytical techniques and business models
Machine Learning to identify future potential maintenance complaints to be monitored
Ongoing software maintenance support for modules implemented