Aircraft maintenance includes all the tasks needed to ensure an aircraft’s continuing airworthiness. Accidents that result from these maintenance activities can be used to assess safety. This research seeks to undertake a preliminary investigation of accidents that have maintenance contributions. An exploratory design was utilized, which commenced with a content analysis of the accidents with maintenance contributions (n = 35) in the official ICAO accident data set (N = 1277), followed by a quantitative ex-post facto study. Results showed that maintenance contributions are involved in 2.8 ± 0.9% of ICAO official accidents. Maintenance accidents were also found to be more likely to have one or more fatalities (20%), compared to all ICAO official accidents (14.7%). The number of accidents with maintenance contributions per year was also found to have reduced over the period of the study; this rate was statistically significantly greater than for all accidents (5%/year, relative to 2%/year). Results showed that aircraft between 10 and 20 years old were most commonly involved in accidents with maintenance contributions, while aircraft older than 18 years were more likely to result in a hull loss, and aircraft older than 34 years were more likely to result in a fatality.
The present study investigates the use of various wingtip devices to analyse the parameters of lift and drag for an aircraft wing. The coefficients of lift and drag are investigated in this research to optimize the wing design for enhancing the aircraft performance. A reduction in the drag produced due to wingtip vortices leads to reduced fuel consumption which contributes to the reduction in fuel emissions. The two-dimensional analysis is carried out for the selection of an apposite aerofoil by comparing the lift/drag characteristics of NACA 0012, 2415 and 23015 respectively at the velocity of 79.16 m/s at the angles of attack of 0°,4°,8°,12°,16° and 20°. The aerofoil section NACA 2415 is used to design the three-dimensional aircraft wing. For the analysis of the various wing tip devices the three-dimensional wing is incorporated with the spiroid winglet, blended winglet, wingtip fence and a mini-winglet. The CFD analysis for the wing designs is carried out for the take-off and landing phases of an aircraft’s flight because the effect of vortices is the highest during these flight phases. The angles of attack range from 0° to 20°. The CFD results reveal that for the wing designs, the plain wing produced the highest drag and the blended winglet proved to be the wingtip device with the most beneficial design. The results obtained for the 30° cant angled blended winglet and 60° cant angled wingtip fence produces additional lift when compared to the results obtained for the counterpart designs. The results obtained from the analysis are in close correlation to the established use of the wingtip devices.
Ensuring aircraft are technically safe to operate is the realm of airworthiness, literally worthy of being in the air. This is achieved not only with technological tools and techniques, or with just personnel and manpower, it is guided and supervised by managers and leaders. As such, the objective of this paper is to understand the role leadership plays in maintaining aviation safety and aircraft airworthiness. To this end, a case study of the Hawker Sidley Nimrod XV230 accident that occurred on September 2, 2006 near Kandahar in Afghanistan, was utilized. The study concluded that leadership is a key aspect, specifically finding that leaders are responsible for articulating the organizations vision, strategic objective setting, and monitoring the achievement of those objectives. It was concluded that operational airworthiness is directly dependent on the leadership ability to provide direction, workplace culture, continued learning, and establish risk management systems for safe and airworthy operations.
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