A Preliminary Investigation of Maintenance Contributions to Commercial Air Transport Accidents

Abstract

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.

Need for Aerospace Structural Health Monitoring

“…Relative to the year, the point of even odds for fatalness was in 1983. Furthermore, the analysis unexpectantly revealed that fatigue accidents were more common in the early to mid-life of an aircraft, peaking in the 10 to 15-year-old age range and decreasing significantly beyond the age of 20 years; this was statistically significantly different to previous research looking at maintenance accidents previously reported (Khan et al, 2020), highlighting that fatigue failure occurs at younger airframe ages then maintenance accidents. There was no relationship observed between fatalness and the age of the aircraft for fatigue failure accident.…”

“…It should be noted, that as expected, the distribution of accidents follows more of a Poisson distribution, with the peak in the 10 to 15 years old range. If this distribution is compared with the similar distribution for maintenance related accidents (Khan et al, 2020), there are significantly more fatigue accidents that occur at less than 10 years of age, and significantly less for 10 to 30 years of age, when looking in age groups of 10 years, up to 50 ( 2 = 64, v = 4, p < 0.01). This indicates that contrary to the initial hypothesis, fatigue failures are more likely to occur with an aging airframe.…”

“…This study utilized an exploratory design (Leedy & Ormrod, 2013), utilized in previous post-accident research (Khan, Ayiei, Murray, Baxter, & Wild, 2020). The first stage of the research involved qualitative directed content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005).…”

Improvement of aircraft maintenance manual (AMM) for Cessna 172

“…Used during maintenance tasks, these documents play a critical role in aviation safety and effectiveness. Errors that occur during the use of documents and following procedures can lead to consequences such as accidents and incidents (Hobbs, 2008; Khan et al , 2020; Insley and Turkoglu, 2021). The Aircraft Maintenance Manual (AMM) examined in this study is a manufacturer’s document and includes basic information about maintenance tasks, warnings and notes and how to perform the maintenance task (Kinnison and Sidiqui, 2013).…”

Special Issue: Civil and Military Airworthiness: Recent Developments and Challenges (Volume II)

“…This Special Issue is focused on safety themes with implications on airworthiness management. It offers a diverse set of analyses on aircraft maintenance accidents [1][2][3][4], empirical and systematic investigations on important continuing airworthiness matters [5][6][7] and research studies on methodologies for risk and safety assessment in continuing and initial airworthiness [8][9][10]. Overall, this collection of papers is a valuable addition to the published literature, and I am confident that the readers of Aerospace will find that useful.…”