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This thesis describes the effects of adverse climatic conditions (sand-dust and high temperature) on aircraft reliability and maintenance. An important and necessary part of the research was conducting field work in aircraft maintenance organisations in Kuwait in order to identify the problems and associated difficulties from the adverse climatic conditions on aircraft systems and aircraft maintenance. Also collected were data and aircraft samples so that they could be analysed to construct models which can be implemented in aircraft maintenance. This research has shown that there are three main systems affected by sand-dust, namely engine, avionics and air conditioning. Engine system experienced significant impact by sand-dust. The PM1Q concentration of sand-dust was found to be the dominant particle size in all three aircraft systems. The PM10 concentration and meteorological parameters were found to be significantly correlated. Two prototype models were constructed, namely Model 1 and Model 2. Forecasts of PM1Q concentration value is generated from meteorological parameters in Model 1. The percentage of deterioration of engine HPT blade from sand-dust contamination is predicted from engine flight data, PM10 concentration and meteorological parameters by Model 2. Both models were tested using historic data and found to accurately predict the PM10 concentration and deterioration of engine HPT blade respectively. In summary, this research provides a novel approach to improve aircraft reliability and maintenance in. arid and semi-arid regions Where sand-dust is dominant, by the implementation of the two prototype models.

The thesis is entitled "Aircraft Maintenance Engineering: Developing an Aircraft Maintenance Programme using Reliability Centred Maintenance/ MSG3 Analysis Taking into Consideration ETOPS and Low Utilisation", It brings together and explains an area that the author feels is not well documented or published today in the world of aviation maintenance management, yet it is fundamental on the continued airworthiness of an aircraft, it can be considered as the building block for maintaining the inherent reliability and airworthiness of the design. It is the author's experience that too many times operators have attempted to carry out the function of maintenance engineering with out full understanding of the reasons and implication of their actions, thus ending up with an ineffective and non applicable collection of maintenance activities that can only add to the expense of the technical operation and even at times contribute to the possibility of occurrences. The thesis also goes on to develop new decision tree diagrams based upon Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) / Maintenance Steering Group 3 (MSG3) analysis for the use in developing the Maintenance and Reliability Programme and incorporating new aspects of aircraft operation.

Lors de la conception des avions, il est courant que les constructeurs évaluent la sûreté de fonctionnement en utilisant des modèles stochastiques, mais l'évaluation de la fiabilité opérationnelle à l’aide de modèles en ligne, pendant la réalisation des missions, reste rarement effectuée. Souvent, l'évaluation stochastique concerne la sécurité des avions. Cette thèse porte sur la modélisation de la fiabilité opérationnelle des avions, pour aider à la planification des activités de maintenance et des missions, ainsi qu’à la bonne réalisation de ces dernières. Nous avons développé une approche de modélisation, basée sur un méta-modèle qui sert de base i) de structuration des informations nécessaires à l’évaluation de la fiabilité opérationnelle d’un avion et ii) pour la construction de modèles stochastiques pouvant être mis à jour dynamiquement. La mise à jour concerne l'état courant des systèmes avion, un profil de mission et les moyens de maintenance disponibles dans les diverses escales incluses dans le profil de la mission. L'objectif est de permettre l'évaluation de la fiabilité opérationnelle en ligne. Deux cas d’études, basés sur des sous-systèmes avion, sont considérés à titre d'illustration. Nous présentons des exemples de résultats qui montrent le rôle important de l’évaluation de la fiabilité opérationnelle pendant une mission d’avion / Dependability assessment, by system manufacturer, during aircraft design, based on stochastic modeling, is of common practice, but model based operational dependability assessment online, during missions' achievement, is seldom done. Usually, the stochastic assessment addresses aircraft safety.This thesis addresses aircraft operational dependability modeling to support mission and maintenance planning, as well as the achievement of the missions. We develop a modeling approach, based on a meta-model that is used as a basis i) to structure the information needed to assess aircraft operational reliability and ii) to build a stochastic model that can be updated dynamically. The update concerns the current state of the aircraft system, a mission profile and the maintenance facilities available at the flight stop locations involved in the mission. The aim is to enable operational reliability assessment online. Two case studies, based on aircraft subsystems, are considered for illustration. We present examples of evaluation results that show the valuable role of operational dependability assessment during aircraft mission