Maintenance Reliability Program as Essential Prerequisite of Flight Safety

This article is dealing with airline industry standards regarding reliability reporting and with practical aspects of reliability program deployment within an operator’s organization. Reliability program is a tool for monitoring the effectiveness of aircraft maintenance program. Apart from being an effective tool for maintenance program development, the reliability program can bring to light flaws in aircraft design, discrepant operational procedures, discrepancies in line and base maintenance. Reliability program is also considered to provide very valuable means for achieving better operational performance (through decreased maintenance-related problems in operation) and increased flight safety. For this reason, reliability programs are mandated by the regulations for all commercial operators. Even though there is a general industry standard regarding maintenance reliability programs, it still has to be customized and optimized by each operator in order to gain the most out of it. Organizational procedures will vary significantly from one operator to another, reflecting the size and structure of the monitored fleet, size of the operator and its engineering power. As maintenance reliability program involves the application of statistic methods in finding systematic negative trends, the bigger the size of the fleet, the more accurate and reliable results can be achieved. This work is outlining the existing airline industry standards and good practice in carrying out maintenance reliability program. KEY WORDS: aircraft maintenance program, maintenance reliability program, flight safety, small airline operator