Investigation on the failure data of commercial aircrafts and computer motherboard

In this paper, an assessment of commercial airplane accident and incident data collected by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) between 1990 and 2009 was provided. The data was analyzed to look for failure characteristics regarding avionics systems and failure data from which the avionics systems of Airbus A319/320 planes operated by China Southern Airlines (CSA) during 2005 was also analyzed. A list showing the proportion of failures caused by various significant parts in these avionics systems was created and the differences between the NTSB data and the CSA data were analyzed. The results of a case study that performed on a major component of commercial avionics systems the Flight Management System (FMS) was presented. FMSs built by different manufacturers was studied, and the failure statistics of these FMSs was presented, which was obtained from our analysis of NTSB and CSA accident and incident data, and then described the typical failure modes of FMSs, and compared them with the failure modes of computer main boards.