Aircraft equipment remaining life for remote deployment

Aircraft maintenance tasks are traditionally performed at scheduled maintenance stops but also unscheduled maintenance tasks performed to correct at known or suspected malfunction or defect. Scheduled maintenance could imply wasteful tasks and may not avoid all failure.

Unscheduled maintenance can be expensive and potentially dangerous. In case of highly demanding missions, both kinds of maintenance are even harder if the tasks have to be performed far away from the mother base  leaving the aircraft on ground and discontinuing the mission for undefined periods of time. In this talk, a new way to predict remaining life for an aircraft equipment is presented. The method is based in combinations of individuals instead of generic designs, and includes receiving different kinds of failure information from on board equipment. The output is the forecast addressing whether a particular equipment installed in a specific aircraft will fail in a limited period of time. This prediction could help aircraft operators to make the decision for replacing a concrete instance of an equipment in advance thus protecting the deployment of the aircraft in highly demanding missions, especially in faraway missions.

Miguel A. Sánchez – Airbus Defense and Space