Risk based maintenance deferral for components subject to hidden failure

In the aviation industry, it may be necessary to employ a combination of Failure Finding Inspection (FFI) and a scheduled discard task at a specific threshold, when a component is aging and its failures are hidden and exert a “safety effect”. This is to ensure an adequate level of availability of hidden functions, and to reduce the risk of multiple failures to an acceptable level. However, in some situations, operators prefer to extend the discard life of components beyond their recommended life limit, due to operational needs or logistic issues. This necessitates the definition of an optimal Failure Finding Inspection interval for the extended life period. The main purpose of this paper is to develop analytical and graphical methodologies to identify the optimal FFI interval for extension of the discard life of aircraft components. The paper considers repairable components which are periodically tested. The methodology assumes that the inspection and repair actions lead to as-bad-as-old (ABAO) reliability characteristics. The graphical approach proposed in this paper considers inspection and repair times, as well as the costs associated with accidents, inspection, and repair, and it takes into account the opportunity losses due to the maintenance downtime. The analytical approach for calculating the unavailability of the hidden function is based on the Mean Fractional Dead Time (MFDT).