Delays and safety in airline maintenance

Abstract Airline maintenance operations affect the potential for flight delays and can also affect flight safety if signals of technical problems are missed or misinterpreted. In this paper, we use a probabilistic risk analysis model, represented by an influence diagram, to quantify the effect of an airline's maintenance policy on delays, cancellations and in-flight safety. The model represents the leading edge (LE) sub-system of a commercial passenger jet and consists of three tiers: (1) a set of management decision variables (e.g. the level of qualification of maintenance personnel); (2) a ground model linking policy decisions and flight delays; and (3) an in-flight model, linking policy decisions, maintenance quality and flight safety. To illustrate this model, we use data adapted (for confidentiality reasons) from a study of an existing airline. Clearly, the LE devices of an airplane are not among the most safety-critical and the risk of an accident due to poor maintenance is extremely small, but non-zero. The same model can be used for other, more critical parts of the aircraft to support maintenance policy decisions in which the trade-off between delays and safety may be more pronounced.