Primarily as a service institution, the Purdue University Airport provides parking, transportation, and airport services for Purdue University staff and students. As the first university owned airport in the United States, LAF is the second busiest airport in Indiana due to Purdue universities flight program. Because of this, the staff at the airport is constantly working on making the facility and its planes as functioning and safe as possible.
Mark Hopkins is the Maintenance supervisor for all the airplanes owned by Purdue University. His job is to make sure all aircraft are inspected and fixed according to FAA regulation and by the specific plane manufacturer. An airport does not have the luxury of debating whether a maintenance department can be seen as a cost or profit facility; it’s a necessity. All the planes must be in nearly perfect working order before they leave the tarmac. If a failure happens during the flight, the accident may be catastrophic. To prevent these disasters from happening, Hopkins must implement various preventive and predictive maintenance measures.
According to Hopkins, 50% of maintenance activities for the planes is preventive and 20% is predictive. Planning, however, is harder to determine. This is because planning maintenance for the airplanes is a task that requires the airport, the FAA, and the manufacture of the planes. Purdue must submit a Maintenance plane to the FAA for approval, as well as work with the manufacturer in order to establish the best maintenance plan for their planes. Hopkins also mentions that firefighting activities can vary from 20-40 percent of their maintenance depending on weather conditions, planes, and pilots. Budget is determined by the finance department based on the requirements from past experience. Equipment is bought on a need-by-need basis.
Computer software (CMMS) is used quite extensively for the maintenance process and to keep track of data and even for analysis purposes. Since a lot of the data is graphical it saves a lot of time in figuring out problems with the aircraft.
Microsoft Office Excel is used to make spreadsheets for tracking of maintenance activities.
OEM portals use adobe acrobat, which allows access for tech publications such as flight manual. All manuals are regularly updated and thus up to date manuals can be downloaded in a very cost effective and secure manner. EG view (Exhaust gas perimeter) is another software used for looking at data taken from Cirrus planes, which is stored in an SD card on the plane during flight. Engine information, manifold pressure, RPM, altitude and 130 other parameters can be analyzed on EGview. It gives an easy graphical ways to observe engine data. TData software stores approach, back up source for airworthiness detection. And also keeps track of inventory. It is updated every 2 weeks.
Pipers use their own software for tech pub uses. The website: www.cirrusreports.com shows flight path on Google earth post flight.
Minor equipment in-flight that does not affect flying may sometimes be ignored if there is time crunch. However, major equipment like engine, brakes and what is required to get the plane running is maintained following the maintenance schedule. Critical equipment is ordered automatically through an SAP system, when they are running low.
Spare parts inventory is provided by API who supplies hardware and access to a web based inventory management system that is maintained by API. Aerospace Products International or API is the aviation industry’s leading provider of parts and innovative distribution and supply chain management solutions. API has a warehouse near Purdue University where they store the critical equipment at their own expense for convenience purposes. When it comes to preventive maintenance they use vibration analysis on their cirrus planes. They use an internal bench marking technique to compare data by dividing a batch of planes. They would experiment on balance tolerances for half of the planes and compare the results to the planes that did not use balance tolerances. The idea was to see how much wear would affect the engine overhaul.
Operating equipment history is managed by keeping track of each inspection process in logbooks. There is a pre-inspection portion of the checklist and a portion of the checklist is accomplished with the engine running and warming up. The data is available to all maintenance personnel and the pilots in an organized area.
If maintenance equipment fails then it results in downtime for flight time for airplanes. When the workforce is swamped with extra downtime, it leads to more expenses since the airport then has to pay employees to work overtime during weekends to play catch up. As mentioned earlier, the airport keeps a strict watch on maintenance equipment required and has tie-ups with companies to deal with replenishment.
Before each flight, the pilot also goes through a checklist of all the flight systems to make sure the plane is ready for flying. If there is any problem when the plane is in air, the pilot has to write out a work order form with the problem so the maintenance crew has a better idea of what could be wrong with the plane. While in the air, the crew can also view the flight path using cirrusreports.com, which uses Google earth to give the crew a better understanding on altitude and location of the flight and as well as various functions such as oil temperature, RPM and fuel flow.
The airport was recently using a 400-hour maintenance program for their Cirrus planes. Here is a picture of that program and as you can see, they were repeating the entire phase within the 400 hour time limit. However, according to Mark Hopkins the airport felt that the program was too intensive for their maintenance crew since so many tasks had to be done in a short period of time. In result, the airport faced extensive downtime and labor costs which at times caused more than half of the fleet to go down.
The new SR20 phase inspection program has an 800-hr program. Scheduling is based on the flights hours that the planes have flown. Purdue is the first airport to implement this program and they had to get permission from the FAA to customize this program. The airport uses a program called Flight Schedule Pro for dispatching flights and for tracking times and maintenance of airplanes get quick reminders and reports on the maintenance status of their fleet.
In the US, aircraft maintenance technicians usually refer to themselves as A&Ps, for airframe and power plant mechanics. Some AMTs (Aviation Maintenance Technician), after at least three years of working in their field, choose to acquire an Inspection authorization, which is an additional rating added on to the individual's mechanic certificate. These individuals are allowed to perform annual inspections on aircraft and sign off for return to service on major repairs and alterations on the required block of the FAA form 337. Certification and limitations, including renewal requirements, of mechanics with Inspection Authorization is contained in 14 CFR Part 65.
Renewal of the IA rating must be done every two years (on odd years) by submitting to the FAA a form showing a minimum of activity in which the Inspection authorization exercised his or her authority. This activity comprises either annual inspections, major repairs, major alterations, or a minimum of 8 hours of FAA approved training. This activity must be accomplished every 12 months even though the renewal period is every 24 months. Also every two years there is recurrent training in specific type of aircraft in this case is the Cirrus plane. In addition to this training, there is an internal policy that every year the technicians have to take extra training in specific area. For example this year he/she must training about the airframe. On the other year they must train in other type of components for instance parachute, initial, composite, motor, and etc.

RECOMMENDATIONS

For our recommendations, we think the airport should add a bigger work force and split the work into a day and night shift. Since most of the planes are idle at night, it can give the night shift workforce a chance to catch up if the day crew has any lag time.

The airport was doing a decent job with housekeeping and bookkeeping but they can still improve organizing works desks of clutter and personal belongings. By doing a better job with housekeeping and bookkeeping, it can lead to information being more organized and the whole airport being less prone to loss and damage. The airport cannot benchmark with other companies because they are the first ones to implement the 800-hour maintenance plan. However they can do internal benchmarking by isolating various tasks and functions and comparing the data with themselves over time. They already do this when it comes to vibration analysis so it will not be very difficult to implement.