Faults overview

Maintenance organizations use the terms non-routine, finding, and discrepancy to describe the discovery of a problem. Maintenix uses the term fault as a synonym for these terms. When faults are discovered, they are recorded manually or automatically as logbook faults in Maintenix. They are assessed, and either deferred or repaired.

Faults are found and raised by the flight crew during flights, during inspections, and by technicians while maintenance work is being performed.

When a fault is raised, Maintenix creates a task with a CORR (corrective) class.

For each aircraft, Maintenix stores the history of each fault and the corrective actions that were completed to fix the fault. You can see a list of faults raised on an aircraft, or a particular system within the last specified number of days. Technicians and others can see whether a fault has occurred before, and whether there is a relationship to other maintenance or faults. Sometimes, a fault is initially attributed to one component, but upon further analysis it is discovered that it is associated with another component on the aircraft. In this case, you can re-assign the fault to another component. You can also link the current fault to previously raised faults, indicating that a previous fault was not corrected properly.

When you raise a fault manually you have the option to create an ad hoc fault or to create the fault with a fault definition. Fault definitions are typically used for faults that occur frequently and for electronic problems that pilots are alerted to by error codes. If there is no fault definition, you create an ad hoc fault. There are different ways to raise faults depending on a variety of factors. See Raising faults.

For faults that are raised by the flight crew or during line and overnight maintenance, technicians work closely with Maintenance Operations Control (MOC) to assess faults and determine whether they must be fixed or can be deferred. At any time engineering assistance might be requested, but all faults raised are either fixed or deferred before the aircraft's next flight. See Request engineering assistance for tasks and faults.

In heavy maintenance, while inspectors or technicians are doing a task, they might discover a fault or potential fault. They raise the fault and it's then listed on the Fault Evaluation tab. The fault will be evaluated later and a planner will incorporate required repairs into the schedule. See Evaluating faults.

Faults that are found when the component is on-wing are raised against the system where the component is installed. When technicians remove faulty components, the fault information is copied to the removed inventory so it can be repaired. If a fault is raised during execution of a task, the fault is linked to the task in which it was found, but the fault is assigned to the suspected faulty inventory, which may be different from the inventory associated with the original task. These faults are also added to the workscope of the work package. You can keep track of the amount of non-routine work in the work package and monitor progress.

When addressing faults, you select either a deferral or a repair reference. References are created by Engineering or MOC and when technicians select references, labor skills and steps from the reference are copied to the fault. If the reference has follow-on tasks, the follow-ons are automatically initiated when a fault is deferred or repaired. See Fault references. If a reference that a technician needs isn't loaded into Maintenix you might use an alternative work flow of manually adding sub-tasks to faults to specify the corrective actions required to fix the fault. See Subtasks on faults.

Once the fault is closed, Maintenix provides summary data for future faults that might use the same corrective action. Specifically, Maintenix shows the number of times that the corrective action has been successful for that aircraft and for the entire fleet.