Depot Maintenance

Requirement to Update Maintenance Analyses Should Be Modified Gao ID: NSIAD-93-163 June 22, 1993

The military services have neither completed nor updated their reliability-centered maintenance analyses on operational aircraft and aircraft engines. Such analyses, part of an overall preventive maintenance approach, are intended to restore equipment to its design levels of safety and reliability. The goal is to ensure, at the least expense, that equipment lasts as long as it was designed to. Service officials said that performing or updating analyses of operational equipment with extensive maintenance experience was not cost-effective. The services are, however, doing reliability-centered maintenance analyses of major systems under development, such as the Army's T800 engine and the Air Force's F-22 aircraft. Pentagon officials believe that applying concepts such as reliability-centered maintenance during system development contributes to efficient preventive maintenance programs.

GAO found that: (1) the Army has not and does not plan to complete RCM analyses, the Navy plans to spend $16.6 million to complete RCM analyses of its operational aircraft systems and newer systems, and the Air Force has not recently updated its RCM analyses; (2) the cost for the Army to complete its RCM analyses would outweigh the expected benefits of reducing potential maintenance costs; (3) although the services have comparable programs to ensure operational systems maintenance, none of the programs include RCM logic procedures; (4) the Air Force has identified potential benefits from RCM analyses including reduced maintenance support costs, increased aircraft mission availability, reduced parts cost, and early identification of high-cost items requiring maintenance at short intervals; and (5) although transportation officials believe that RCM analyses are beneficial in the early stages of aircraft or aircraft engine program development, the cost-effectiveness of continued RCM analyses is questionable when reliable maintenance data are available to update maintenance tasks and intervals.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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