PLANNING OF TRAINING AIRCRAFT FLIGHT HOURS

Abstract

Maintenance of the training aircraft causes downtime of operations and thereby reduces the operational availability, which is crucial for flight planning in a training organisation. Manual daily planning within the fleet delivers suboptimal results and often causes discontinued flight of several aircraft that have to be maintained at the same time. Optimal maintenance schedule of training aircraft can be obtained by a sliding scale method. This paper presents a mathematical model of the sliding scale formulated by a mixed integer linear problem. Allocation of flight hours is optimised by using AMPL programming language, assuring that a sufficient number of aircraft are always available for training. The model can be used by a flight dispatch department in a training organisation as a basis for optimised planning and reduction of maintenance downtime.

Keywords

• Aircraft maintenance
• operational availability
• allocating flight hours
• sliding scale method
• mixed integer linear problem