Environmental Considerations for Avionics Installation

The Reliability Engineering Discipline was established more than 20 years ago and today is an accepted science in virtually all major companies. Application of the reliability discipline has been almost totally dedicated to the design/build/test areas on the apparent assumption that when the equipment leaves the manufacturing facility it has a fixed “designed-in” reliability level which will be experienced by all users.

Unfortunately this rather idealistic assumption does not hold true.

The purpose of this paper is to examine only briefly what the traditional reliability program accomplishes, and then to describe, both qualitatively and (where possible) quantitatively, the other factors which have a significant impact on equipment field reliability performance levels.