Human Reliability in Civil Aircraft Inspection

Abstract

Inspection of structures, systems and engines is an important part of ensuring continued airworthiness of the civil aircraft fleet. This paper describes the airworthiness assurance system and considers applicable bodies of knowledge which help understand and predict aircraft inspection performance. Two examples of recent studies of aircraft inspectors are used to illustrate the extra depth and breadth of understanding available where such knowledge is applied to these tasks. It is concluded that perhaps we have two separate roles: to predict performance and to improve it. Quantitative prediction will never be complete, but better estimates of inspector variability help us set more realistic inspection intervals. However, for improving aircraft inspection tasks we should concentrate on broader contextual factors, despite our inability to quantify some of these effects.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2001
Accession Number
ADP010442

Entities

People

  • C. G. Drury

Organizations

  • University at Buffalo

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aerospace Industry
  • Aircraft Industry
  • Aircraft Maintenance
  • Aircrafts
  • Airframes
  • Civil Aviation
  • Commercial Aircraft
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Flight Training
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Motor Skills
  • New York
  • Psychology
  • Reliability
  • Task Performance And Analysis
  • Transport Aircraft
  • Visual Inspection

Readers

  • Aviation Science / Aeronautics.
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Systems Analysis and Design