Communication: key to modern maintenance

Flying Safety, June, 2002 by G. Arleigh Dom

Editor's Note: This article is reprinted from the February 1956 issue of Aircraft Accident and Maintenance Review. Despite the fact that many maintainers today are women, the article shows that some messages are timeless. Communication is till the key to modern maintenance. Maintenance professional must always communicate with each other, AFETS, MAJCOMs, depots and the manufacturers to ensure our high-tech modern aircraft always fly safe.

When a new aircraft has been built, and the Air Force has given it final approval, there begin for the product two allied but distinguishable lives. One is the life of operations, the other is the life of maintenance. In both of them, the company that brought the aircraft to you can play an extremely important role, but only if it is helped by you who do the actual operating and maintaining. What I'd like to discuss here are the methods we now use to carry out our functions, and the ways you can help us to improve them.

Let's look at the situation. The manner in which an aircraft is operated and maintained is determined by what we call "rules." By "rules" I mean all the information, orders and policies that surround any work that is done by individual Air Force people. They are the guides without which the aircraft could neither be operated nor maintained. Now, where do these rules come from and what happens to them in actual service?

The rules for operating an aircraft or missile are suggested by the contractor, for he knows the best design capabilities of the product and has extensively tested it before sending it out. But when the product reaches the field, these "rules" are modified and strengthened on the basis of Air Force flight experience. So the rules for operating an aircraft or missile are never exactly what we who laid them down thought they would be.

In maintenance on the other hand, a company can be pretty sure that the rules it lays down for its customers to follow today will be good ones to follow tomorrow. It looks, on the face of it, as though maintenance men have an easy time of it; but it just isn't so, as many of you can attest. The difficulty facing the maintenance man is not in having his time-worn rules replaced by new ones, but in having so many new rules in addition to all the old ones. And not only are these rules more numerous, they are also much more complex than the old standbys. There's a reason for this, and it's related, strangely enough, to the activities of flight personnel rather than to anything done by maintenance personnel.

There are just so many things the pilot and his crew can handle while they're flying; when this limit is reached, the aircraft designer has to turn to automatic controls to do the rest of the work. And when things are done automatically in the air, it generally means that there's a maintenance problem on the ground. Proof that this has happened can be afforded by a look at the automatic and semi-automatic equipment included in today's aircraft, compared to the equipment of 10 years ago. About all that remains, actually, is the 1945 radio For each of these novelties--LOX, ejection seats, pressurization and so forth--the pilot has some responsibility, but the maintenance man has to take the brunt of the work. So the complexity of modern aircraft and missiles is coming home to roost in the hangar. You maintenance people have to pay for the technical advances we're making.

This probably comes as no surprise to Air Force men, but there are several points which ought to be brought out about it. As this tendency continues, there will be more work, not less; and it's qualitative as well as a quantitative increase. Maintenance people are going to have to expand their horizons, because the Air Force is going to need more men who are both imaginative and technically informed in the new and terrifically complex problems. If it were a case of merely quantitative increase, a greater number of men would solve the problem. But the real problem is in finding men who are ingenious enough to master the new rules that are bound to come up.

This brings us to the central message I want to get across. We in the aircraft industry want to help you improve yourselves and your work, in meeting the challenge of modern complexity. The aircraft company is, I think it's fair to say, the focal point for maintenance information on its product. So it's natural that we should all be interested in the communications between us. The difficulty is that the people who are to maintain the aircraft or missile are hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away from the information. How do the Air Force and the Air Force's contractors pass the word?

The bulwark of the communications between us, of course, is the Technical order. All the latest information on the aircraft is presented here, and it's in constant revision. Prepared by the contractor and reviewed by the Air Force, this literature gives you complete and up-to-date information.

Supplementary to the official literature are a number of special aids. Courses--offered both by the Air Force and by the contractor--give maintenance men an acquaintance with their aircraft thorough enough to enable them to return fruitfully to their T.O.; Mobile Training units, most often accompanied by Air Force training units, bring modem methods of visual education to bear on particularly knotty problems. Certain publications, such as this magazine, deal informally with problems common to all Air Force maintenance work. Other booklets, often prepared by the manufacturer, help to clarify special difficulties in understanding this product.