What Airline Engineers Taught Property Managers About Repairs
News is cool, but what can we learn from history?
2 min read
For most of history, maintenance meant fixing things after they broke. Equipment ran until it quit, then somebody repaired it. Factories, railroads, and eventually airlines moved toward a second approach: service equipment on a fixed schedule whether it seemed to need it or not. That became the standard idea of preventive maintenance, and for a long time nobody questioned it. But eventually airlines did.
Heavily Scheduled Maintenance: Maybe Not The Move
In 1960, commercial carriers formed an industry task group to study what preventive maintenance could actually accomplish. Later the Department of Defense asked United Airlines to document how civil aviation built its maintenance programs, and two United engineers, Stanley Nowlan and Howard Heap, published the result in 1978 under the title Reliability-Centered Maintenance. They found that many failures can’t be prevented by scheduled work at all, and that in some cases heavy scheduled maintenance made failures more likely. Opening up a working system gives something a chance to go wrong. Airlines adopted the idea of reliability-centered maintenance, and by most accounts saved money while improving reliability.
The lesson wasn’t to stop maintaining things, but rather to match the work to the equipment: service the parts that wear out on a predictable pattern, monitor the rest by condition, and keep records so decisions rest on history instead of habit.
What This Means for Rental Homes and Apartment Communities
Florida makes this concrete, because HVAC runs hard for most of the year. Lessen, a maintenance services company, reports that an HVAC system without regular service can waste up to 20% more energy and lose a decade or more of expected life. Department of Energy and NIST benchmarking, as cited by Lessen, found that moving from reactive-only maintenance to a planned program cuts maintenance costs 12 to 18% a year. The same analysis puts apartment and rental home turnover near 47% annually, with vacancy loss alone above $1,300 per unit. Reliable service is one of the cheaper ways to keep residents happy and maintain renewal rates.
Takeaways for Owners and Operators
Planned work costs less than emergency work. The 12 to 18% savings in federal benchmarking comes from shifting spend away from after-the-fact repairs.
Records are the real asset. Equipment age, service history, and failure patterns in one place let you plan capital spending instead of absorbing surprises.
Florida makes HVAC the line to watch. A compressor that runs fine today is often the one that fails at peak demand in August.
Fewer emergencies mean fewer frustrated residents. Every avoided breakdown is one less reason for a lease not to renew.
Airline engineers spent years learning that the right maintenance beats the most maintenance. Rental homes and apartment communities get the same payoff from knowing what they own and servicing it on purpose. A good management partner should be a strong advocate of preventative maintenance and provide the data to back up those decisions and recommendations.
Atrium Management Company provides property management, commercial brokerage, and real estate development services. Learn more here.
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Sources and Further Reading:
STLE, “Sometimes less is better”: https://www.stle.org/files/TLTArchives/2017/05_May/From_the_Editor.aspx
Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association, “Predictive Maintenance”: https://cirruspilots.org/Articles/predictive-maintenance
Reliability Academy, “Reliability Centered Maintenance Principles”: https://reliabilityacademy.com/reliability-centered-maintenance-principles/
Lessen, “What Deferred Maintenance Really Costs Rental Property Owners”: https://www.lessen.com/resources/what-deferred-maintenance-really-costs-rental-property-owners