June 1, 1987
Principal components analysis is applied to nine indicators of aircraft reliability, maintainability, and safety. The indicators are standard readiness measures such as mean time between failure at different points in the aircraft's career. The data are adjusted to include only the airframe. The assumption behind the analysis is that the observable variables are indicators of an underlying unobservable variable, 'airframe quality.' This principal components analysis provides a quality 'score' for each aircraft. Five of the six aircraft analyzed fall within one standard deviation of the average score. The scores for the first principal component account for over 85 percent of the variation in the original indicators, which is highly significant in a statistical sense. This finding supports the initial hypothesis; 'quality' exists and is the major source of variation across aircraft in the nine indicators.
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