Aircraft Scheduled Airframe Maintenance and Downtime Integrated Cost Model

Aviation industry has grown rapidly since the first scheduled commercial aviation started one hundred years ago. There is a fast growth in the number of passengers, routes, and frequencies, with high revenues and low margins, which make this industry one of the most challenging businesses in the world. Every operator aims to undertake the minimum operating cost and gain profit as much as possible. One of the significant elements of operator’s operating cost is the maintenance cost. During maintenance scheduling, operator calculates the maintenance cost that it needs to budget. Previous works show that this calculation includes only costs that are directly related to the maintenance process such as cost of labor, material, and equipment. In some cases, overhead cost is also included. Some of previous works also discuss the existence of another cost throughout aircraft downtime, which is defined as cost of revenue loss. Nevertheless, there is not any standard model that shows how to define and calculate downtime cost. For that reason, the purpose of this paper is to introduce a new model and analysis technique that can be used to calculate aircraft downtime cost due to maintenance.