The Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), Air Marshal Hasan Abubakar, has said that the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) is currently adopting the predictive maintenance culture across all its Engineering and Maintenance units, designed to assist in determining the condition of in-service aircraft and other equipment nationwide in order to estimate, ahead of time, when maintenance should be performed.
This was contained in a statement made available to Defence Correspondents in Abuja on Monday by Director of Public Relations and Information of the Service, Air Vice Marshal Edward Gabkwet.
According to the statement, the Air Chief stated this while addressing personnel of NAF Logistics Command, Lagos, during his operational tour of NAF units in the Lagos area.
This approach, according to the CAS, would enable cost savings over routine or time-based proactive or preventive maintenance culture.
Air Marshal Abubakar explained that the advantage of predictive maintenance was that it allowed for convenient scheduling of corrective maintenance and prevented unexpected equipment failures.
According to the Air Chief, “with the right data of equipment lifetime, the tendency for increased plant safety, fewer accidents with negative impact on environment, and optimized spare parts handling is assured.
“We have moved away from proactive maintenance culture to predictive maintenance. This has been possible because we have continued to keep up-to-date data about our spares and current maintenance status of all our platforms.
“With this, it will enable us to provide spares before they are due for maintenance. It will also reduce downtime while expediting aircraft serviceability.”
It added that the CAS also spoke about the need to continually sustain and enhance NAF’s safety standards and reemphasized that safety training would henceforth be compulsory in all NAF training institutions,
It further explained that the CAS also revealed that all NAF institutions have been directed to review their curriculums to include all aspects of safety training.
According to the statement, ” Predictive maintenance differs from proactive maintenance because it relies on the actual condition of equipment, rather than average or expected life statistics, to predict when maintenance will be required.
“Some of the main components that are necessary for implementing predictive maintenance are data collection and preprocessing, early fault detection, fault detection, time to failure predictions, maintenance scheduling and resource optimization.
“Predictive maintenance is well entrenched in advanced militaries worldwide. According to an article published on 19 January 2023 in defensenews.com, the US Army, for instance, first implemented predictive maintenance on it AH-64 helicopters in 2005. By 2012, the Service was using this approach with the UH-60 helicopter as well as some vehicle programs. By early 2022, it had installed predictive maintenance capability on 65% of its CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopter fleet”
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