An Airline Approach to Reliability

This paper presents a brief history of reliability activities within the airlines and discusses some new approaches representing joint efforts of the airlines and the Federal Aviation Agency. It discusses the application of the “Alert” concept of reliability to subsystems of the aircraft and outlines the evaluation program developed by Pan American and approved by the FAA.

The author concludes that the airlines must learn more about the science of reliability and how to adapt the techniques to aircraft maintenance. It appears that in so doing the life potential of the many parts in the aircraft can be more fully realized with resultant improvement in reliability and decrease in costs.