Cost of specifying maintenance/failure free operating periods for Royal Air Force aircraft

The Royal Air Force has been increasingly required to operate and support aircraft on deployed operations and in the most efficient way possible. In an effort to increase the availability of RAF aircraft and thus increase their effectiveness, a method of specifying reliability has been increasingly adopted that looks for success rather than the previous philosophy which accepted that failure was inevitable. M/F-FOP measures the probability that a mission or series of missions can be successfully completed without failure or without maintenance degrading the ability to conduct the next mission or series of missions. However, the M/F-FOP philosophy is still relatively immature and not been applied to many equipments so Ear delivered to service; it needs further credibility if it is to gain ground against MTBF and thus an identification of the costs involved is required. Traditional reliability philosophies such as MTBF are inherently flawed and are frequently misused causing confusion and wasted effort. On the other hand, M/F-FOP assumes that success is attainable and that the probability of that success can be accurately applied from entry into service; moreover, it specifies needs in unambiguous terms. That it is advantageous to aircraft systems has been shown in the civil aircraft field with aircraft like Boeing 777 and the Airbus Family already in service. This paper identifies and examines the cost drivers of M/F-FOP and develops them into a Metric to inform the R&M community of the financial and non-financial cost/value benefits and penalties of M/F-FOP. A method by which qualitative data could be resolved into quantitative data was developed in order to produce the Metrics. Analysis of these Metrics provided the following: Purchase cost benefits < Purchase cost penalties. Operating cost benefits > Operating cost penalties. Non-financial positive impacts > negative impacts. Of course actual costs cannot be stated or validated until Royal Air Force M/F-FOP aircraft enter service.