“Airlines are pouring lots of time and money into understanding fleet reliability,” reports The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 12, 2017). Delta put together a team of mechanics, engineers and data geeks to find ways to make specific types of planes less prone to breakdowns. American has renewed efforts to schedule flights so each type of plane performs better.
“It’s not necessarily the airplane itself. It’s how we’re operating it,” says American’s VP. If no planes are reserved as spares, fleets become less reliable. Small fleets spread out among multiple hub airports often suffer higher cancellation rates because there aren’t opportunities to swap planes. Time scheduled for routine maintenance can get crimped if the planes get to mechanics late day after day. In 2016 American had 6 different kinds of wide-body jets flying international trips from Chicago. Reliability suffered. When glitches hit, the airline had little ability to swap planes.
Summer reliability is critical for airlines. Among the worst-performing planes were United 747s, which arrived on-time an average 63% of flights during the past 2 summers. United says it has worked the last several years on improving the reliability of the wide-bodies to achieve better on-time performance. Wide-body cancellations are down 60% since 2014.
Delta’s technical data team can not only predict which parts are liable to break, but also redesign some parts to make them more reliable and add monitors to track the health of parts on older jets. Suspect parts get replaced proactively ahead of manufacturers’ recommended replacement schedules, dramatically cutting cancellations. In 2010, Delta had 5,600 flights canceled by maintenance problems. Last year breakdowns caused only 303 cancellations, and the airline has suffered only 70 so far in 2017. Delta also loads seven 40-foot trailers each summer and sends mechanics out with the equipment to small cities to create temporary maintenance bases for specific types of planes. Last summer they were positioned in 7 spoke cities to do preventive maintenance on planes parked overnight there.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Why do reliability figures differ dramatically among airlines and plane models?
- What is the “secret” to picking an on-time flight?