The maintenance plan and your aircraft – awareness during an aircraft lease transition.

The maintenance plan and your aircraft are important lease considerations for awareness during an aircraft lease transition; the maintenance program will be developed by a CAMO (Continued Airworthiness Management Organisation) based on multiple documents from the manufacturer of the aircraft and components along with other factors such as local authority requirements.

It is also important to consider that the maintenance plan in use for the aircraft must be approved by the National Aviation Authority (NAA) – this is referred to as the AMP (Aircraft Maintenance Program).

The AMP will cover all applicable (Type Certificate) TC (Original Equipment Manufacturer) OEM tasks assigned to remain airworthy and compliant to the maintenance schedule; essentially this means the manufacturers requirements to keep the aircraft airworthy.

Additional considerations are then also reviewed and incorporated as required such as SBs, ADs and then other specific OEM documents such as the OIT (operator information transmission) and SIL (service information letter) which might give additional information on maintenance to increase life or reduce failure of a component for example.

When an operator has an aircraft on lease there is often some specific tasks that are called up in a maintence plan specifically for that operator, maybe due to environment or even due to a company requirement; additionally, the interval for some tasks to be carried out can be reduced or called up early, this is commonly based on experience in service.

When an aircraft is being leased it should be returned with an agreed “standard” of maintenance plan, typically this is resetting task intervals to manufacturer guidelines if adjusted and certain tasks might be removed that are operator specific and not relevant to a generic aircraft.

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