A Field Study of the Maintainability and Reliability of an Interceptor Squadron

This paper analyzes in terms of flight operations the maintenance and reliability data collected by RAND during a field study of interceptor squadron effectiveness. This study was made several years ago, but the limited availability of this type of information makes worth-while its availability in an unclassified document, even though the aircraft is no longer in the Air Force inventory. The results are primarily useful in that they indicate the importance of certain parameters on maintenance and reliability. In particular, the validity of the Poisson distribution for predicting both the failures generated by system operation and the time required for repair was examined. The effect of periodic inspection on reliability was also of concern. This paper presents some highlights of the study. More detailed results are discussed in the authors´ original RAND paper.¹