OEM Perspectives OEMs see avionics maintenance issues
from a different perspective. Rockwell Collins and Honeywell see expansion in the aftermarket as a win/win for them and their customers. They anticipate working more closely with the airlines in areas such as maintenance/repair, spares management and logistics. Honeywell’s director of program management, David Shilliday, told Aviation Maintenance that the trend toward greater complexity and density in avionics is “certainly more challenging from a repair standpoint.” Between surface-mounted technology and multilayer printed circuit boards, it takes a pretty high degree of technical sophistication and test equipment to perform repairs,” he says. “Airlines will always be able to do some level of repairs, but the trend may be to more shop-replaceable unit exchange.” Shilliday argues that, while new devices—such as IFE, traffic awareness systems and windshear detection— have been added to aircraft in the past 20 years, the bigger trend is toward system-level integration. “So the number of devices on an aircraft is shrinking and functions are beginning to be integrated,” he says. He cites the addition of windshear detection computer functions with both ground proximity warning computers and radar. In addition there is the need for specialized piece parts, Shilliday adds. “Due to the demanding environments [of] aerospace applications and 30+ year product life, typical mass market or consumer-grade components…are not always sufficient to ensure reliability [and] performance.” And availability of repair parts for long-term support may be an issue, he says. Commercial parts often have a very short lifecycle, which makes them susceptible to obsolescence. “We use [mass market components] in our designs to the extent possible, but we must balance the advantage of low-cost, mass production with performance and long- term support requirements.” Rockwell Collins anticipates partnering more with airlines and airframers. The OEM cites its RECAP program, under which airlines share fleet type and flight hour information, which is combined with removal and repair data to provide reliability performance and trend information. The idea is to improve product reliability, which improves aircraft dispatch rates and reduces costs.
vice president, maintenance operations. “Many new configurations greatly improve these areas of impact.” But the increasing regulations of SFAR 88—the special federal aviation regulation on fuel tank system fault-tolerance evaluation requirements— and electrical wiring interconnect system (EWIS) “require more program investments in training and manpower to maintain electrical/avionic systems, including LRU [line-replaceable unit] head units, compliantly,” Laughter says.
But it is tricky to generalize. Delta Air Lines has not seen an overall increase in the operational impact of individual avionics-related AOG events in the past four and a half years, Laughter says. Just the opposite. The impact of avionics- related AOG events has decreased by 24 percent during that period. “Events appear to be occurring more often but with less individual impact,” he says.
Issue Du Jour—Data Access The next big battle will be over IP [intellectual property],” Jozic predicts. “At AMC there were a lot of questions from airlines who are asking for data and not getting it.” Data access is a potentially serious issue, but nobody’s audited it yet, Jozic says. “Nobody’s exercised the issue.” At the heart of many AMC discussions was the OEM’s component maintenance manual (CMM). Airlines that purchase supplier-furnished equipment (SFE) are supposed to receive Level 3 CMMs—with information all the way down to board repairs. But carriers are not always getting this. Although airlines don’t always know this, the airframer’s product support assurance agreement entitles them to receive Level 3 CMMs, test equipment specs and diagrams, and access to
procurable piece parts, says Mitch Klink, ARINC’s AMC chairman.
Some B787 CMMs, for example, are being written at Level 1—for box-level, go/no-go test. While this may be a timing issue, with warranties in effect, it is still a sore point. Nor are the airlines always getting complete documentation for OEM repairs.
New avionics units sometimes come with “tiny CMMs,” and CMMs for older avionics components are sometimes being thinned down from Level 3 to Level 2 by the removal of repair procedures in the latest revisions, Jozic says. (Level 2 involves replacing circuit cards instead of repairing them.) Or the CMM simply states: If the LRU is out of limits, send it to OEM for repair, he says.
Airlines with Level 3 capability want to have Level 3 CMM data because it’s
Marijan Jozic, ARINC’s Avionics Maintenance Committee vice chairman
48 Aviation Maintenance |
avm-mag.com | December 2011 / January 2012
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