Maintenance Work in Small Aircrafts: An Ergonomic Approach

Abstract

Airline line safety depends on a number of people ranging from pilots to the aviation maintenance technicians. Nowadays there is a growing recognition that maintenance errors pose a serious threat to airline safety. So, the Federal Aviation Administration has launched an extensive research in the field of human factors related aircraft maintenance. Not much research has gone into maintenance of small jets used for business and chartering purposes. For this purpose, the study was made in a private organization specializing in the maintenance of small jet aircrafts. The overall productivity of the past years was studied for various models of aircrafts and it was observed that the airframe department had a high rate of maintenance related errors. It was also evident that Falcons had a reasonably high rate of maintenance errors associated with it. Moreover it was found out that Falcon 50's and Falcon 900's had a high number of incidents associated with them. A task analysis was also done for the maintenance activities performed on Falcon 50's to identify the factors responsible for the high rate of errors. To assess the problem of human errors in the airframe department data about the incidents was collected by direct observation, informal interviews and incident data analysis. To show more light into the incidents, the incident analysis was done by interviews with the 50 employees responsible for the incidents, and the 55 incident report forms on Falcons for the years 2000–2002 were further analyzed.