The Relationship Between Material Failures and Flight Hours: Statistical Considerations
Published Date: January 1, 1985
This paper attempts to clarify the relationships among the following four hypotheses: (1) the number of material failures across intervals of calendar time containing equal accumulated flight hours follows a Poisson distribution; (2) the number of elapsed flight hours between successive independent material failures follows an expotential distribution; (3) the expected number of monthly material failures is exactly proportional to monthly flight hours; and (4) the observed number of monthly material failures is strongly correlated with monthly flight hours.
