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BUSINESS AVIATION AND THE BOARDROOM
Aircraft Reliability You can only manage what you can measure. David Wyndham is an owner of Conklin & de Decker where the focus of his activities is on aircraft cost and performance analyses, fleet planning, and life cycle costing for clients. Mr. Wyndham can be contacted at david@conklindd.com
Demming, Druker and others concur that you can only manage what you can measure, outlines David Wyndham. Business leaders know this almost instinctively. So how can the logic be applied effectively to the reliability of the company aircraft? ould the CFO who sees only total expenses and total income adequately manage the finances of a company? The CFO with a copy of every dollar spent and received, conversely, would be inundated with data. In an ideal scenario, various levels of management need various levels of information. In terms of aviation, the pilot needs to know how much fuel is required for the trip, the aviation manager needs to know the cost of fuel from various sources and total fuel used, and the manager of the company’s aviation function needs to have a measure on how well the flight department is doing. Two major productivity measurements commonly used for flight departments are trips/hours flown and passengers carried. These show how well, or how reliably the service is delivered.
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WORLD AIRCRAFT SALES MAGAZINE – October 2012
www.AvBuyer.com
DISPATCH AVAILABILITY AND RELIABILITY Aircraft availability and dispatch reliability are two vital signs of any aviation operation. Availability refers to whether the aircraft is available for a flight, whether scheduled or not. An aircraft in for maintenance cannot be flown, and thus is not available. Does your aircraft spend too much time in the maintenance shop and too little time available for flight? At its most basic, aircraft dispatch reliability accounts for whether the aircraft took-off on time, and if not, why? If the dispatch performance of the aircraft is poor, then so is the level of service. If your car spent a lot of time in the dealer’s service department or broke down several times a year, you would want to know why. The airlines recognize the importance of these metrics and spend considerable resources defining and tracking availability and dispatch data. To the airlines, a standard reliability window is a departure from the gate within 15 minutes of schedule, excluding non-aircraft issues such as air traffic delays, bad weather, connection delays (due to waiting on transferring passengers), etc. Scheduled airlines U
Aircraft Index see Page 4