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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1991

Human factors in aircraft maintenance and inspection

The events which have led to the intensive study of aircraft structural problems have contributed in no less measure to study of the human factors which influence aircraft maintenance and inspection. Initial research emphasis on aging aircraft maintenance and inspection has since broadened to include all aircraft types, both new and old. The role of today's aircraft maintenance workforce is indeed a complex one as it is strongly influenced by the need to maintain the broad technology mix embodied in the current fleet. Technicians must be equally adept at diagnosing and repairing "old-tech" 727, DC-9 type aircraft and "new-tech" 767, and MD-ll's. Their skills must include ability to repair sheet metal and composite materials; control cables and flyby-wire systems; round dials and glass cockpits. Their work performance is heavily influenced by others such as designers, technical writers, job card authors, schedulers and trainers. This paper describes activities concerning aircraft maintenance and inspection human factors.

Aging Aircraft↗
NASA NTRS2002

Unsafe acts and unsafe outcomes in aircraft maintenance

Road safety studies using the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ) have provided support for a three-way distinction between violations, skill-based errors and mistakes, and have indicated that a tendency to commit driving violations is associated with an increased risk of accident involvement. The aims of this study were to examine whether the three-way distinction of unsafe acts is applicable in the context of aircraft maintenance, and whether involvement in maintenance safety occurrences can be predicted on the basis of self-reported unsafe acts. A Maintenance Behaviour Questionnaire (MBQ) was developed to explore patterns of unsafe acts committed by aircraft maintenance mechanics. The MBQ was completed anonymously by over 1300 Australian aviation mechanics, who also provided information on their involvement in workplace accidents and incidents. Four factors were identified: routine violations, skill-based errors, mistakes and exceptional violations. Violations and mistakes were related significantly to the occurrence of incidents that jeopardized the quality of aircraft maintenance, but were not related to workplace injuries. Skill-based errors, while not related to work quality incidents, were related to workplace injuries. The results are consistent with the three-way typology of unsafe acts described by Reason et al. (1990) and with the DBQ research indicating an association between self-reported violations and accidents. The current findings suggest that interventions addressed at maintenance quality incidents should take into account the role of violations and mistakes, and the factors that promote them. In contrast, interventions directed at reducing workplace injury are likely to require a focus on skill-based errors.

Maintenance/manpower/methods↗
NASA NTRS1972

Space shuttle recommendations based on aircraft maintenance experience

Space shuttle design recommendations based on aircraft maintenance experience are developed. The recommendations are specifically applied to the landing gear system, nondestructive inspection techniques, hydraulic system design, materials and processes, and program support.

Spears, J. M.↗
NASA NTRS1980

Aircraft maintenance. Citations from the International Aerospace Abstracts data base

These citations from the international literature concern various aspects of aircraft maintenance. Both military and civil aviation experience are included. Articles cited concern airline operations, engine and avionics reliability, the use of automatic test equipment, maintenance scheduling, and reliability engineering. This updated bibliography contains 347 citations, 85 of which are new additions to the previous edition.

Zollars, G. F.↗
NASA NTRS1994

A Telerobotics Architecture for Aircraft Maintenance and Remanufacturing

The application of telerobotics to aircraft depot maintenance and remanufacturing is described and a telerobotics architecture for the application is discussed. Telerobotics will enhance process quality and could potentially decrease turn-around time and costs while moving human operatiors from hazardous work areas to safe and comfortable operator control stations.

intelligent robotics capabilities telerobotics haz↗
NASA NTRS1993

Robots for Aircraft Maintenance

Marshall Space Flight Center charged USBI (now Pratt & Whitney) with the task of developing an advanced stripping system based on hydroblasting to strip paint and thermal protection material from Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters. A robot, mounted on a transportable platform, controls the waterjet angle, water pressure and flow rate. This technology, now known as ARMS, has found commercial applications in the removal of coatings from jet engine components. The system is significantly faster than manual procedures and uses only minimal labor. Because the amount of "substrate" lost is minimal, the life of the component is extended. The need for toxic chemicals is reduced, as is waste disposal and human protection equipment. Users of the ARMS work cell include Delta Air Lines and the Air Force, which later contracted with USBI for development of a Large Aircraft Paint Stripping system (LARPS). LARPS' advantages are similar to ARMS, and it has enormous potential in military and civil aircraft maintenance. The technology may also be adapted to aircraft painting, aircraft inspection techniques and paint stripping of large objects like ships and railcars.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2003

Associations between errors and contributing factors in aircraft maintenance

In recent years cognitive error models have provided insights into the unsafe acts that lead to many accidents in safety-critical environments. Most models of accident causation are based on the notion that human errors occur in the context of contributing factors. However, there is a lack of published information on possible links between specific errors and contributing factors. A total of 619 safety occurrences involving aircraft maintenance were reported using a self-completed questionnaire. Of these occurrences, 96% were related to the actions of maintenance personnel. The types of errors that were involved, and the contributing factors associated with those actions, were determined. Each type of error was associated with a particular set of contributing factors and with specific occurrence outcomes. Among the associations were links between memory lapses and fatigue and between rule violations and time pressure. Potential applications of this research include assisting with the design of accident prevention strategies, the estimation of human error probabilities, and the monitoring of organizational safety performance.

Professional Competence↗
NASA NTRS2006

Commercial Aircraft Maintenance Experience Relating to Engine External Hardware

Airlines are extremely sensitive to the amount of dollars spent on maintaining the external engine hardware in the field. Analysis reveals that many problems revolve around a central issue, reliability. Fuel and oil leakage due to seal failure and electrical fault messages due to wire harness failures play a major role in aircraft delays and cancellations (D&C's) and scheduled maintenance. Correcting these items on the line requires a large investment of engineering resources and manpower after the fact. The smartest and most cost effective philosophy is to build the best hardware the first time. The only way to do that is to completely understand and model the operating environment, study the field experience of similar designs and to perform extensive testing.

Soditus, Sharon M.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Skills, rules and knowledge in aircraft maintenance: errors in context

Automatic or skill-based behaviour is generally considered to be less prone to error than behaviour directed by conscious control. However, researchers who have applied Rasmussen's skill-rule-knowledge human error framework to accidents and incidents have sometimes found that skill-based errors appear in significant numbers. It is proposed that this is largely a reflection of the opportunities for error which workplaces present and does not indicate that skill-based behaviour is intrinsically unreliable. In the current study, 99 errors reported by 72 aircraft mechanics were examined in the light of a task analysis based on observations of the work of 25 aircraft mechanics. The task analysis identified the opportunities for error presented at various stages of maintenance work packages and by the job as a whole. Once the frequency of each error type was normalized in terms of the opportunities for error, it became apparent that skill-based performance is more reliable than rule-based performance, which is in turn more reliable than knowledge-based performance. The results reinforce the belief that industrial safety interventions designed to reduce errors would best be directed at those aspects of jobs that involve rule- and knowledge-based performance.

Aircraft↗
NASA NTRS1995

Identifying Human Factors Issues in Aircraft Maintenance Operations

Maintenance operations incidents submitted to the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) between 1986-1992 were systematically analyzed in order to identify issues relevant to human factors and crew coordination. This exploratory analysis involved 95 ASRS reports which represented a wide range of maintenance incidents. The reports were coded and analyzed according to the type of error (e.g, wrong part, procedural error, non-procedural error), contributing factors (e.g., individual, within-team, cross-team, procedure, tools), result of the error (e.g., aircraft damage or not) as well as the operational impact (e.g., aircraft flown to destination, air return, delay at gate). The main findings indicate that procedural errors were most common (48.4%) and that individual and team actions contributed to the errors in more than 50% of the cases. As for operational results, most errors were either corrected after landing at the destination (51.6%) or required the flight crew to stop enroute (29.5%). Interactions among these variables are also discussed. This analysis is a first step toward developing a taxonomy of crew coordination problems in maintenance. By understanding what variables are important and how they are interrelated, we may develop intervention strategies that are better tailored to the human factor issues involved.

Veinott, Elizabeth S.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Using Intelligent Simulation to Enhance Human Performance in Aircraft Maintenance

Human factors research and development investigates the capabilities and limitations of the human within a system. Of the many variables affecting human performance in the aviation maintenance system, training is among the most important. The advent of advanced technology hardware and software has created intelligent training simulations. This paper describes one advanced technology training system under development for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Aging Aircraft↗
NASA NTRS1990

CREW CHIEF: A computer graphics simulation of an aircraft maintenance technician

Approximately 35 percent of the lifetime cost of a military system is spent for maintenance. Excessive repair time is caused by not considering maintenance during design. Problems are usually discovered only after a mock-up has been constructed, when it is too late to make changes. CREW CHIEF will reduce the incidence of such problems by catching design defects in the early design stages. CREW CHIEF is a computer graphic human factors evaluation system interfaced to commercial computer aided design (CAD) systems. It creates a three dimensional man model, either male or female, large or small, with various types of clothing and in several postures. It can perform analyses for physical accessibility, strength capability with tools, visual access, and strength capability for manual materials handling. The designer would produce a drawing on his CAD system and introduce CREW CHIEF in it. CREW CHIEF's analyses would then indicate places where problems could be foreseen and corrected before the design is frozen.

Aume, Nilss M.↗
NASA NTRS2001

Scenario-Based Specification and Evaluation of Architectures for Health Monitoring of Aerospace Structures

HUMS systems have been an area of increased research in the recent times due to two main reasons: (a) increase in the occurrences of accidents in the aerospace, and (b) stricter FAA regulations on aircrafts maintenance [2]. There are several problems associated with the maintenance of aircrafts that the HUMS systems can solve through the use of several monitoring technologies.This paper documents our methodology of employing scenarios in the specification and evaluation of architecture for HUMS. Section 2 investigates related works that use scenarios in software development. Section 3 describes how we use scenarios in our work, which is followed by a demonstration of our methods in the development of KUMS in section 4. Conclusion summarizes results.

Mukkamala, Ravi↗
NASA NTRS1993

Forecasting the impact of virtual environment technology on maintenance training

To assist NASA and the Air Force in determining how and when to invest in virtual environment (VE) technology for maintenance training, we identified possible roles for VE technology in such training, assessed its cost-effectiveness relative to existing technologies, and formulated recommendations for a research agenda that would address instructional and system development issues involved in fielding a VE training system. In the first phase of the study, we surveyed VE developers to forecast capabilities, maturity, and estimated costs for VE component technologies. We then identified maintenance tasks and their training costs through interviews with maintenance technicians, instructors, and training developers. Ten candidate tasks were selected from two classes of maintenance tasks (seven aircraft maintenance and three space maintenance) using five criteria developed to identify types of tasks most likely to benefit from VE training. Three tasks were used as specific cases for cost-benefit analysis. In formulating research recommendations, we considered three aspects of feasibility: technological considerations, cost-effectiveness, and anticipated R&D efforts. In this paper, we describe the major findings in each of these areas and suggest research efforts that we believe will help achieve the goal of a cost-effective VE maintenance training system by the next decade.

Schlager, Mark S.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Structural risk assessment and aircraft fleet maintenance

In the present analysis, deterministic flaw growth analysis is used to project the failure distributions from inspection data. Inspection data is reported for each critical point in the aircraft. The data will indicate either a crack of a specific size or no crack. The crack length may be either less than, equal to, or greater than critical size for that location. Non-critical length cracks are projected to failure using the crack growth characteristics for that location to find the life when it will be at critical length. Greater-than-critical length cracks are projected back to determine the life at failure, that is, when it was at critical length. The same process is used as in the case of a non-critical crack except that the projection goes the other direction. These points, along with the critical length cracks are used to determine the failure distribution. To be able to use data from different aircraft to build a common failure distribution, a consistent life variable must be used. Aircraft life varies with the severity of the usage; therefore the number of flight hours for a particular aircraft must be modified by its usage factor to obtain a normalized life which can be compared with that from other aircraft.

Smith, Herb, Jr.↗
NASA NTRS1997

Operational Interventions to Maintenance Error

A significant proportion of aviation accidents and incidents are known to be tied to human error. However, research of flight operational errors has shown that so-called pilot error often involves a variety of human factors issues and not a simple lack of individual technical skills. In aircraft maintenance operations, there is similar concern that maintenance errors which may lead to incidents and accidents are related to a large variety of human factors issues. Although maintenance error data and research are limited, industry initiatives involving human factors training in maintenance have become increasingly accepted as one type of maintenance error intervention. Conscientious efforts have been made in re-inventing the team7 concept for maintenance operations and in tailoring programs to fit the needs of technical opeRAtions. Nevertheless, there remains a dual challenge: 1) to develop human factors interventions which are directly supported by reliable human error data, and 2) to integrate human factors concepts into the procedures and practices of everyday technical tasks. In this paper, we describe several varieties of human factors interventions and focus on two specific alternatives which target problems related to procedures and practices; namely, 1) structured on-the-job training and 2) procedure re-design. We hope to demonstrate that the key to leveraging the impact of these solutions comes from focused interventions; that is, interventions which are derived from a clear understanding of specific maintenance errors, their operational context and human factors components.

Kanki, Barbara G.↗
NASA NTRS1997

Reduction of Maintenance Error Through Focused Interventions

It is well known that a significant proportion of aviation accidents and incidents are tied to human error. In flight operations, research of operational errors has shown that so-called "pilot error" often involves a variety of human factors issues and not a simple lack of individual technical skills. In aircraft maintenance operations, there is similar concern that maintenance errors which may lead to incidents and accidents are related to a large variety of human factors issues. Although maintenance error data and research are limited, industry initiatives involving human factors training in maintenance have become increasingly accepted as one type of maintenance error intervention. Conscientious efforts have been made in re-inventing the "team" concept for maintenance operations and in tailoring programs to fit the needs of technical operations. Nevertheless, there remains a dual challenge: to develop human factors interventions which are directly supported by reliable human error data, and to integrate human factors concepts into the procedures and practices of everyday technical tasks. In this paper, we describe several varieties of human factors interventions and focus on two specific alternatives which target problems related to procedures and practices; namely, 1) structured on-the-job training and 2) procedure re-design. We hope to demonstrate that the key to leveraging the impact of these solutions comes from focused interventions; that is, interventions which are derived from a clear understanding of specific maintenance errors, their operational context and human factors components.

Kanki, Barbara G.↗