Rationalizing scheduled-maintenance requirements using reliability centered maintenance-a Canadian Air Force perspective

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and reliability centered maintenance (RCM)/maintenance steering group (MSG) decision logic have been successfully used by military and commercial aviation manufacturers for over three decades to develop preventive maintenance programs for new aircraft fleets. However, once a fleet is in place, there is a requirement to periodically validate or rationalize the applicability and effectiveness of individual tasks in the program, and to adjust task frequencies. Experience has shown that it is inefficient to re-apply FMEA/RCM decision logic to every aircraft item on a fixed frequency basis. This paper identifies how the Canadian Air Force (CAF) proposes to make more efficient and effective use of the in-service data it collects to identify those items for which the preventive maintenance requirement is ineffective or inapplicable. Moreover, it discusses how the same data source can be used in follow-up investigation to determine the actual failure mode history of an item as a basis for comparison with the FMEA-the basis upon which the requirement for the existing tasks is developed.