We learnt earlier that an airport has a lot of facilities. They include buildings, runways, taxiways, aprons, car parks, hangars, warehouses, communication towers, communication equipment, computer systems and many others.

These facilities are used 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. When any facility is used continuously, its performance will deteriorate. The service provided using the facility will also deteriorate, become unreliable or may be interrupted altogether. To avoid this all these facilities need to be maintained in good working order. The Airport Facility Maintenance function is carried out to fulfill that need.

All airport operators need to have a maintenance service to maintain their facilities. The personnel involved in this service attend to breakdowns promptly and restore the services. They also inspect the facilities regularly, identify areas that require attention and take necessary action to maintain the facilities in good usable condition.

Airport facility maintenance involves almost all branches of Engineering. For example, the maintenance of runways, taxiways, and buildings require Civil Engineering. The maintenance of runway lights, stand by power systems, solar power plants and battery banks require Electrical Engineering. The maintenance of cooling plants, air conditioners, baggage belt drives, and heavy vehicles used in airport services require mechanical Engineering. The maintenance of water treatment plants and environment protection devices require Chemical Engineering. The maintenance of Baggage screening equipment, communication equipment and medical equipment requires Electronic & Telecommunication Engineering. The maintenance of computer networks, data centres, information display systems, data communication equipment and data transmission equipment requires Computer Engineering and Information Technology.

Runway maintenance is critical to the safety of planes that land and take-off (Picture source: You Tube)

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For this reason, Airport facility Maintenance requires multi-disciplinary deployment of staff skilled in a variety of trades. Just like the personnel involved in airport operations and air navigation services, the maintenance personnel also need to work round the clock, ready to go into action on call.

Maintenance has two components namely corrective maintenance and preventive maintenance. Corrective maintenance means attending to failed systems so that they can be put back in service. Since airport operations cannot be interrupted for long periods, corrective maintenance is usually carried out by replacing failed parts usually in largest replaceable units. For example, if the engine of a power generator fails, the engine itself is replaced by a spare engine although the fault may be in a small component in the engine. Tracing the fault to that component would take time and would delay the restoration of the generator back into service. The removed engine is later examined at a workshop to trace the faulty component which is then attended to and the working engine is kept on standby to replace another engine that may fail. This method of replacing the largest replaceable unit is common in all branches of airport facility maintenance. It also requires the carrying of an adequate stock of spare units at all times.

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Preventive maintenance means the regular inspection of systems to identify developing faults before they culminate in a total failure and attending to them beforehand. Things like applying lubrication on moving parts, painting of building walls to protect from weather beat, controlling the growth of vegetation on the sides of the runway are all examples of this type of maintenance. Sometimes certain items which fail often (e.g. bulbs) are replaced regularly even if they have not failed. The average life of these items are usually known and just before they complete that time in the field they are replaced by new ones. This prevents the need for them to be replaced during operation because failures would generally not occur before the average life is complete.

Regular inspection is an important element of preventive maintenance  (Picture source: en.aktorfm.gr)

Maintenance personnel also need to be highly skilled and well trained. They also need to be provided with specialized tools and instruments to perform their tasks. However, not all their trades are unique to aviation. While things like runway maintenance, runway lighting maintenance are specialized functions found only within airport services, things like maintenance of air conditioning plants, stand by generators, large buildings are similar to those found in other large scale establishments like ports, hotels, hospitals, universities etc.

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