Recently our Air Niugini has had increase frequencies of technical issues that have ground and weigh down our ‘Bird Of Paradise’ from soaring up and higher. View the LinkedIn Article ——->
Our ANG is a physical asset intensive GoPNG SOE which productivity and profitability rests on the reliability and the eventual availability of its fleet of aircrafts. Reliability (and Availability) is a probability that a process/system/equipment/component will perform a specific function over a specific time period and under specific support conditions.
The specific support conditions are the critical success factors or the support conditions that prop up or improve and sustain aircraft fleet reliability and maintainability to meet the demand for ANG’s services. Click link below for more on the specific support conditions.
The demand for ANG’s services is the driving force for productivity of its airplane fleets. This demand is established by the sales and marketing function which will have its budget called the ‘Sales Budget’. This ‘Sales Budget’ projects the revenues from sales of ANG’s services. The ‘Sales Budget’ is usually the starting point in preparing the ‘Master Budget’ which is comprised of other budgets. A budget, therefore and if you like, is in essence a promise that is made to the clients, the stakeholders and the shareholders and that promise must be endeavoured to be kept.
It is important that the ‘Sales Budget’ must be as accurate as possible. ‘Sales Budget’ accuracy depends on a number of factors and what should be primary among them is understanding the true ‘inherent production capacity’ and making accurate the ‘Production Budget’ as much as possible to deliver on its promise. Having inaccuracies can end up in two cases: the best case scenario is to under promise then meet or exceed budget expectations; the worst case is overpromising our clients in the market as well as the stakeholders and shareholders as we struggle to deliver on the budget promises over the specific budget period.
Accurately measuring ANG’s airplanes fleet’s availability and production capacity plays a big part in the accuracy of the ‘Production Budget’ promise. ANG’s airline fleet’s availability is the output of the efforts, primarily in maintenance and reliability functions that feeds into establishment of the ‘Production Budget’.
The technical limit capacity of ANG’s aircraft fleets can be established from the maintenance and reliability perspectives using ‘optimisation’ by graphical solution via ‘Linear Programming’ and ‘Availability Block Diagramming’ in order to make accurate production forecast.
See the link below for a STAR (situation target action result) story of a mine mobile fleet and how this approach could be considered for possible application to the airline fleet if not done yet to established its current technical production limit capacity with the present aircrafts fleets.
Only when we know ANG’s true inherent technical limit capacity, then we can take decisive actions to restore it to a reputable airline in our region. One of such actions will be to introduce a redundancy configuration or standby aircrafts per airline fleet to improve reliability and eventually availability.
Our ANG needs a bold vision, strategic thinking and pragmatic mission going into the future. To mitigate the risk of fleet unreliability impacting on operations and cash flow and to improve and sustain its vital service as it serves the nation, a bold decision is needed to build redundancy (i.e. a standby aircraft per fleet) into its aircraft fleets so it can reliably soar into new heights. Yes it will cost more, but we pay now or we will pay later but many times over in effects cost (in increasing frequency of flight delays; frustrated customers and esp overseas tourists; and loss of reputation which puts a dent in our country’s pride). It should not be a question of ‘Economic Rationalisation’ but rather based on ‘National Rationalisation’.