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Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-94/5

Title and Subtitle: Human Factors in Airway Facilities Maintenance: Development of a Prototype Outage Assessment Inventory Form A, N94-26136

Report Date: February 1994

Authors: Blanchard, R.E., and Vardaman, J.J.

Abstract: The airway facilities (AF) maintenance community is concerned with identifying ways of reducing both the incidence of equipment failure and the amount of time required to restore equipment to operational status following a failure. It is vitally important to identify the many components of downtime and contributors to a particular outage (equipment failure). Thus, the primary objective of this study was to develop a technique or tool with which to identify and map within a "systems" structure all potentially significant contributors to AF maintenance downtime. The technique was designed to facilitate (a) the collection of maintenance related data during an actual outage; (b) the entry of this data into a data base; and (c) the analysis of the data base in order to identify causal relationships.

The secondary objective was to be able to make use of past outage data as a means for building the data base by determining whether overall outage time values can be apportioned among the contributors to downtime using subject matter experts (SMEs) who were intimately involved in restoring a given outage. SMEs from the Oklahoma City (OKC) General National Airspace System (GNAS) Airway Facilities Sector (AFS) and the Memphis GNAS AFS assisted in the iterative design and review process that produced the Airway Facilities Outage Assessment Inventory Form A (AFOAI). Ten previous OKC GNAS outages and four previous Memphis GNAS outages were analyzed using the AF('AI Form A, thus confirming that the inventory is a useful tool in identifying specific contributors to AF maintenance downtime. Recommendations were to continue to refine the format of the AFOAI and to install it on a trial basis to test its usefulness in collecting and analyzing data on factors and conditions contributing to facility outages.

Key Words: Airway Facilities, Data bases, Corrective maintenance, Human factors, Quantification, Maintenance reporting

No. of Pages: 25