Page 10 - RCM - A Practical Guide

RCM - A Practical Guide

WHERE DID RCM COME FROM?
The short answer here is from a report commissioned by United Airlines in 1978 and written by F
Stanley Nowlan and Howard F Heap.
But, in truth, the foundations were laid long before that study. A correlation between major
maintenance activities and subsequent unreliability of equipment - since coined ‘The Waddington
Effect’ was noticed by C.H. Waddington in 1943. He was conducting operational research into the
effectiveness of the RAFs B24 fleet of aircraft. One of his findings was that otherwise reliable aircraft
were being subjected to invasive maintenance every 50 flight hours which led to a period of
unreliability due to maintenance induced or bedding-in failures.
Move forward another 20 years (or so) to the 1960s and a series of reliability programmes in the US
aviation sector introduce a series of documents, based on analysis, for the derivation of aircraft
preventive maintenance. Those studies resulted in the issue of Handbook - Maintenance Evaluation
and Program Development, MSG-1 (July 10, 1968) and the superseding Specification Maintenance
Program Development, Maintenance Steering Group - 2nd Task Force (MSG-2) (January 8, 1970).
In 1974 the US Department of Defense (DoD) started to take note of the benefits of RCM for its own
aviation platforms but felt that there was no adequate explanatory guidance and so they
commissioned United Airlines to create it…the result of which was the Nowlan and Heap Reliability-
centred maintenance publication previously mentioned. Genesis.
The 1980 initial issue of MSG-3 Operator/Manufacturer Scheduled Maintenance Development by ATA
(for aviation) and 1991 initial issue of RCMII by John Moubray (for industry) are based heavily on the
findings of Nowlan & Heap and both endure today.

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