Statistical Models And Decisions In Aircraft Service

Abstract

Aircraft structures have many components. Maintaining high reliability for these structures generally requires that the individual structure components have extremely high reliability, even after long periods of time. One of the most important problems in the fatigue analysis and design of aircraft structures is the prediction of the fatigue crack growth in service. Available in-service inspection data for various types of aircraft indicate that the fatigue crack damage accumulation in service involves considerable statistical variability. The objectives of this paper are to (i) describe possible statistical models to deal with the crack growth variability, (ii) point out their applications.