Aircraft Maintenance Planning Engineering Function
The Continuous Airworthiness Management Organization “CAMO” is essentially responsible for 4 primary functions: Planning, Technical Records, Engineering, and Reliability. These groups work together to ensure that the Aircraft remain fully compliant with all requirements concerning the aircraft maintenance management and associated oversight.
Within the CAMO department the Maintenance Planning Group has a range of responsibilities including the delivery of the aircraft maintenance work package to ensure the aircraft remains fully compliant with the Maintenance Program. However this is only part of the story, in a way this could be considered to be the “fixed” portion of the workload, as it does not fluctuate rather it is based on the Maintenance Planning Document “MPD”.
Together with the fixed workload there is an associated and variable work load driven by Airworthiness Directives (AD’s). Modifications (Mods), and Service Bulletins (SBs) and Deferred Defects. Because of the “Ad Hoc” nature of the activities an additional dimension is added which complicates the planning process. It becomes more challenging for the planning process both in terms of maintenance planning and production planning. This is due to the variability of the work required by ad hoc task, which in some cases can be very significant and have repercussions which impact other elements of the maintenance activity.
In the case of such “Ad Hoc” activities it may be necessary to draw on additional expertise provided by the resources of the Engineering or Technical Services group.
The duties of the support group will be to typically review the content of the proposed activity and to determine not only the required tooling and equipment but the various steps which have to be performed to deliver the required activity.
In the case of AD’s for example it is mandatory that we comply fully with the requirements of the directive, sometimes the compliance requires a detailed understanding of the component configuration within the aircraft system. For this reason it is usual to involve a technical expert group.
It is a truth that the more detailed the planning the more effective will be the performance of the task, however there is a trade off in that the time we allow ourselves to analyze the task and prepare detailed accomplishment instructions, has to be weighed against the size of the task and the number of times the task is going to be performed across the fleet.
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