Research On Composite Maintenance Cost Of Civil Aircraft

The economy of aircraft maintenance is a important index which the aircraft designers andoperators concern. The level of maintenance cost have a significant influence on the profitability of anaircraft,and to some extent, it determines the aircraft market share. With the B787, A380and someother new civil aircrafts enter into the market, the maintenance of composites and cost issues turn tothe most important things. on the aircraft designer’s opinion, the application of composite materialscan significantly reduce aircraft maintenance costs, for example, the Dream Liner B787is expected toreduce about20%of total maintenance costs. But composite structures are still in the situation ofhigher manufacturing and repairing costs, airlines begin to worry about whether they can reallyachieve the desired goal of reducing maintenance costs. So understanding the composition ofcomposites maintenance costs and analyzing the influence which composites impacting on the overallmaintenance costs can help airlines making a nice assessment of composite maintenance costs, andspecifying the detailed amount of cost reduction to manage aircraft maintenance costs.In this paper, research of composites maintenance costs is based on the cost breakdown structureof aircraft maintenance. Then some key factors related to the composite maintenance costs areanalyzed in detail, and a method is proposed to solve the problem of composite maintenance costsestimates. In this method, some important parameters(e.g. maintenance interval, maintenance manhours, failure rate) need to be confirmed, the paper also gives some basic principles to get the specificvalues. After understanding the relationships between the elements of cost breakdown structure,thelevel of composite maintenance costs can be quickly estimated, an example of B787based on theMicrosoft Excel software describes this estimate procedure at the end of this paper.