Analysis of Airworthiness Directives for Formulating Aircraft Sensor Solutions and Maintenance Strategies

Airworthiness Directives (ADs) serve as a medium through which commercial and military regulators improve the system’s performance by responding to the failure of the airplanes. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and United States Air Force (USAF) provide ADs that detail overall cost on operators. The dataset derived from the Boeing 767 (B767) and its military derivatives, USAF’s KC-46A gives ideas into sensor solutions and maintenance approaches that may reduce these costs. Given the ADs significant costs for Boeing 767 operations, an analytical failure framework that determines the failure modes and failure mechanisms is introduced. For example, a huge portion of severe impairment (e.g., cracking, corrosion, and chafing) constitutes 27% of failure mechanisms in these systems. To reduce future B767 ADs for commercial and military operators, sensor solution and maintenance strategies using performance metric and genetic algorithm are assessed. As a result, maintenance downtimes may be decreased by this framework by providing prompt warning to any fault that would require time and money to fix.