Seminar Report — Aircraft Maintenance and Operation

ORGANIZED by the Aerospace Industries Division of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, this seminar addressed the airworthiness concepts with the views of regulatory authorities, manufacturers and operators being aired so that a complete picture was obtained of all aspects of the process. Introduced by Alistair Cumming, engineering director of British Airways, the viewpoint of an authority was presented by the head of maintenance approvals of the CAA, A T Dalton, who first spoke of the setting of aircraft maintenance targets. Much of the compliance with design requirements of a large aircraft in the UK that is necessary is concerned with structural and systems testing and the production of the system safety assessment (SSA). The majority of tasks produced from the SSA are replacement of parts, inspection/servicing or system/monitoring. The first two of these categories have been in use for some time but the third group of activities shows a need for reliability programmes for aircraft systems and components. The CAA operating standards appraisal programme (OSAP) has been established whose purposes are to identify operators whose systems and standards are consistently good and for whom routine inspections might be relaxed.