A Strategy for the Development of a Web-based Tool to Reduce Aviation Maintenance Errors

The safety and reliability of air transportation depends on minimizing inspection and maintenance errors that occur in the aircraft maintenance system. Efforts have been invested to track maintenance errors. These efforts are reactive in nature: they analyze maintenance errors after their occurrence. There is a lack of standardization in the assessment of maintenance errors across the maintenance industry. Surveillance and auditing of maintenance activities are two important functions which help ensure airworthiness of an aircraft. A system that will document the processes and outcomes of these maintenance activities and will make this documentation more accessible will accomplish the goal of this research to reduce maintenance error. Such a system would then support robust and safer aircraft maintenance operations. Our research is developing a web-based surveillance and auditing tool (WebSAT) that promotes a standardized format for maintenance data collection, reduction and analysis to proactively identify the factors contributing to improper maintenance.