Aviation View - Dec 2023

5 AVIATION VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 3, ISSUE 4 BUSINESS AVIATION MAINTENANCE IN A DIGITALLY PREDICTIVE WORLD Thanks to emerging digital technology, business aviation maintenance technicians will have greater access to increasingly vast amounts of predictive data, promising to increase effectiveness, efficiency and safety. There’s no worse feeling in business aviation than having to tell the boss that their multi- million-dollar jet is broken. And for as long as any of us can remember, maintenance technicians have been using preventative maintenance practices to repair and replace parts before an AOG occurs. “Preventative maintenance steps are spelled out by the OEM and FAA based on the estimated failure times of certain components within the aircraft,” explained Jody Kerton, systems specialist for Dassault Falcon. “Repetitive inspection and maintenance practices are all based on those guidelines. Every XX months or XXX hours, you have to inspect this or replace that. “We really want to be able to change a component before it fails, but you don’t want to change it too early,” Kerton said. “You want to change it when change is just right. But how can we be sure we know when that is? Operators rely on the OEM to give guidance.” While that kind of MTBF (mean time between failure) foresight is based on copious amounts of testing and historical fleet data, it’s still more of a technological “crap shoot” than an exact science. As any director of maintenance (DOM) will tell you, the methodology mostly works, but it can lead to having to answer a tricky question like, “Why did you spend money replacing a perfectly good part?” As Nick Kershaw, product development lead for Gulfstream Aerospace Corp., explained, “Our aim O p e n i n g L i n e s