Page 12 - RCM - A Practical Guide

RCM - A Practical Guide

Figure 2 - Yearly Accident Rate per Million Flights

DOES RCM MAKE EQUIPMENT LESS SAFE?

It’s true that RCM does not introduce maintenance for every single possible failure; in fact, the
acceptance of run-to-failure could arguably be one of the biggest benefits of RCM. But it does not
compromise on safety (or anything else an organisation might find important). To illustrate that…
Civil aviation industry, in 2015 the fatal accident rate was 1 crash per 5 million take offs with
equipment failure accounting for 1/30 (compared to 2/3 in 1958).
In 2015 not a single passenger fatality was recorded on a Western-built jet, excluding those from
suspected acts of violence. The global Western jet fleet transported 3.7 billion people on 32 million
flights.
Equipment design, of course, will have improved greatly but they are all (or very close to all)
maintained by preventive maintenance programmes derived through RCM.

OVERVIEW OF A RCM PROCESS

For RCM the driving motivator for instigating preventive maintenance (or not) is not prevention of
failures but preventing the consequences failure. RCM provides the Analyst with a logical process,
which must be followed, in order to determine which Functions are significant and what the
consequences of a failure might be.
How?
RCM breaks a platform down into manageable functional sections, by system, and applies a failure
modes and effects analysis (FMEA) in order to capture each failure and its consequences. Once the
FMEA has been completed RCM uses a decision diagram to identify the most appropriate mitigation

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