In aircraft project management, reliability and maintainability are fundamental for ensuring system safety, for optimizing the manufacturing process and for improving assembly/disassembly operations when maintenance actions are required. The inclusion of such requirements helps to minimize life cycle costs, augments the residual lifetime of aircraft and consequently increases customer satisfaction. While most papers published in the aircraft engineering literature are rather evasive or do not accurately describe the role of reliability and maintainability (RM) methods in early design phases, this paper elucidates the problem. This paper discusses various concepts such as design for reliability and risk assessment analysis for improving aircraft safety and reliability at the deployment stages. The article also focuses on how reliability prediction issues are addressed using various methods, tools and standards, such as failure modes and effect analysis, fault tree analysis and guidelines such as MIL-STD-217f and ARP4754. Finally, this paper demonstrates that reliability is crucial to consider in all phases of the life cycle of an aircraft.
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