Alltrikes

The first article: "The Savvy Aviator #61: Secrets of Cost-Effective Maintenance"

Under the FARs, performing maintenance is the job of an A&P mechanic or FAA-approved repair station, but managing maintenance is the owner's job. In essence, the FAA looks at each aircraft owner as the Director of Maintenance (DoM) of a one-aircraft aviation department. Unfortunately, few owners know how to do this important job, and most do it very poorly. Many owners leave it to their A&Ps to manage their maintenance, and generally are unhappy with the results.

.... cutting to a meaty quote from the middle of the article ....

"Because Cessna's service-manual recommendations have to work for every airplane in the fleet, even the worst-case airplane. And there's probably some Cessna somewhere -- probably a Cessna 185 on floats up in Alaska that spends six months of the year operating off salt water and the other six months of the year locked up in a hangar because the weather is too bad to fly -- that actually does need to have its trim tab actuators lubricated every 200 hours!

But my airplane lives in a hangar and flies regularly throughout the year, so servicing the trim-tab actuators on my airplane every 200 hours would be gross overkill (by a factor of 10 or 20).

More to the point, it never makes sense to maintain a component on a fixed timetable (i.e., every so many hours or so many months) when it's feasible to monitor the condition of the component (which takes two minutes for trim-tab actuators) and maintain it only when the condition monitoring tests indicate that maintenance is actually required. We call this "condition-directed maintenance" (CDM) as opposed to "time-directed maintenance" (TDM)."

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The next article "The Savvy Aviator #63: Recommended or Required?"

has this among it's tastier bites of information:  "Another much misunderstood regulation is FAR 43.13, which states in part:

§43.13 - Performance rules (general).
(a) Each person performing maintenance, alteration, or preventive maintenance on an aircraft, engine, propeller, or appliance shall use the methods, techniques, and practices prescribed in the current manufacturer's maintenance manual or Instructions for Continued Airworthiness prepared by its manufacturer, or other methods, techniques, and practices acceptable to the Administrator, except as noted in §43.16 ...

This regulation is often misinterpreted by mechanics to mean, "If it's in the maintenance manual, then you have to do it." But that's not what it means, at least for Part 91 operators of small piston or single-engine turbine aircraft. The key to understanding FAR 43.13 is the phrase "methods, techniques and practices." That phrase refers to how to do something, not when to do something."

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Read both articles and break into discussion below ;)

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These articles are also good:

The Savvy Aviator #53: The Dark Side of Maintenance

The Savvy Aviator #47: Reliability-Centered Maintenance (Part 1)

       The Savvy Aviator #48: Reliability-Centered Maintenance (Part 2)

      The Savvy Aviator #49: Reliability-Centered Maintenance Q&A

The last 3 articles really raised my eyebrows when I read them.

A quote:  "For example, it was determined that scheduled overhauls on turbine engines do not produce any reliability or economic benefit whatsoever, and that maintaining such powerplants strictly on-condition provides longer life, reduced maintenance costs, and improved reliability. (I am becoming convinced that the same is true of piston aircraft engines, and will discuss this further in Part 2 of this column next month.)

Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) has resulted in immense cost savings for the airlines. Here are some examples:

The initial maintenance program for the Douglas DC-8 (developed before the advent of RCM) required scheduled overhaul of 339 items. The larger and far more complex DC-10 (whose maintenance program was developed using RCM) required scheduled overhaul of just seven items, none of them engines.

The pre-RCM DC-8 required 4,000,000 man-hours of structural inspections during its initial 20,000 hours of operation. The post-RCM Boeing 747 required only 66,000 man-hours over the same interval.

Not only are these cost savings huge, but they are achieved with no decrease in reliability. To the contrary, reliability has actually improved in most cases where emphasis shifted from time-directed maintenance (TDM) like scheduled overhauls to condition-directed maintenance (CDM)."