Assessment of Avionic Equipment Field Reliability and Maintainability as Functions of Unit Cost

Abstract

Pound-for-pound, avionics is generally recognized as the most expensive, complex and sophisticated part of an aircraft. Reliability and maintainability are critical characteristics that influence spares provisioning, maintenance resource requirements, system operational availability and, ultimately, investment and operating costs. Consequently, much attention has been focused upon improving the reliability and maintainability of avionics which, in the past, have been disappointingly low. This paper addresses avionics reliability and maintainability. The analysis was performed last year in partial response to a request of IDA by OASD (C(3)I) to provide information for use by DSARC principals at the Full-Scale Development milestone. Since the 5000 series of DoD Directives and Instructions emphasize analytical comparisons of any new systems under consideration by the DSARC with current, comparable systems, we undertook analyses to determine if there may be one or more historical relationships between field reliability and maintainability and avionic equipment characteristics that would assist in forecasting those attributes.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 07, 1981
Accession Number
ADA109373

Entities

People

  • Joseph W. Stahl
  • Mark I. Knapp

Organizations

  • Institute for Defense Analyses

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Automatic Direction Finders
  • Avionics
  • Coefficients
  • Cost Analysis
  • Costs
  • Databases
  • Direction Finders
  • Equations
  • Integrated Circuits
  • Maintainability
  • Maintenance
  • Radar Altimeters
  • Regression Analysis
  • Reliability
  • Specifications

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Life Cycle Cost Analysis