Maintenance Documentation

Text signals in the aircraft maintenance documentation

Text signals in the aircraft maintenance documentation

Herimanana ZAFIHARIMALALA, André TRICOT In collaboration with EADS IW Université de Toulouse2 – Le Mirail herimanana.zafiharimalala@univ-tlse2.fr, andre.tricot@tououse.iufm.fr

Abstract:

After a brief description of the aircraft maintenance documentation trough its functions and content, this paper presents results from two types of studies about the use of text signals in the maintenance documentation used in the aeronautical field. The first study is based on the observations and interviews of the maintenance operators during their task; the second study concerns ergonomic inspection of the documentation based on ergonomic criteria about structure and content. The two results confirm the problem linked to the information presentation (characters size, bad quality of figures, etc.) and structure and allow also concluding that aircraft maintenance documentation must be improved by the use of more efficient text signals in order to make easier the use the documentation at the work place and to avoid maintenance errors.

Keywords:

signals.

Aircraft maintenance documentation, procedural documentation, text

1 Introduction

Maintenance and inspection are the major factors of aircraft accident for 12 % (Hobbs, 2000) because of errors made during the operation. According to Chaparro et al. (2002) and the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), the cause of most of the maintenance errors is the documentation used to guide maintenance tasks. For Lattanzio et al. (2008), procedural errors in aeronautic maintenance have different forms and are due to both document quality and users errors (see Figure 1).

H. Zafiharimalala, A. Tricot

Figure 1 The relationship between information quality (contributing factors), maintenance error types and operational events (Lantazio et al., 2008).

Consequently, the usefulness (relevance of the content) and...