The more often your fleet of aircraft is on the ground, the less profitable you are. It doesn't take an engineer or genius to realize this.

When your system isn't optimized it’s leaking efficiency, just like an oxygen mask with a hole. [TWEET THIS]

Dangerous.

The trick is to structure your Boeing maintenance intervals to reduce downtime and increase up-time.

How do you go about this? What you're doing might be “working” but are you optimizing the system to take advantage of your Boeing maintenance intervals?

Where you are now

Line and base maintenance for your fleet is a standard practice. Each airline is different so I’ll spare you the additional reading.

When your fleet of aircraft is parked for their scheduled checks you pay for man hours, parts, and lost revenue potential.

On average it costs you $15.12 per flight hour for an A check, $32.92 for a C check and $22.87 for a D check.

In a typical 24 year life cycle you will accrue 24 D checks, 67.2 C checks and 48.7 A checks.

We’ll use the C check as a base line here. A C check interval is 6,000 FHRS, that’s $197,520 for every C check, per aircraft.

When your aircraft arrives early you incur unnecessary costs for no faults found, but when it arrives too late there's a high probability for unscheduled maintenance.

Optimizing the maintenance interval ensures you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck. Increased utilization.

Where you want to be

Your Boeing maintenance strategy is one that will continually need improvement.

We've talked about lean six sigma before.

However, the road to get there isn't always easy or straightforward. Statistical analysis is great but other factors are always welcome. The Bottom-Up and the Top-Down Approach, Maintenance Task Packages, and Boeing Maintenance Checks can be grouped into maintenance clusters.

By utilizing this simulation you fulfill 4  purposes:

1) You simulate the aircraft utilization 2) You calculate when a maintenance item turns due 3) You will fit each Boeing maintenance item into clusters 4) You generate maintenance clusters

Clustering is one of hundreds of optimization strategies you can be taking advantage of.

Whatever strategy you take, optimizing it to reduce your total cost of maintenance is the goal. There's no room for complacency.

According to Boeing SASMO application, through optimization you can save $500,000 over a 10 year period.

Now, I don't know about you but I would start optimizing your Boeing maintenance intervals today.

Want more information on your Boeing maintenance checks? Click here.