ABSTRACT
Maintenance jobs typically start and finish with documentation. Documents not only convey instructions about task performance, but they also play an important part in communication by recording the completion of tasks and the extent of system disturbance. A study of the normal day-to-day activities of airline maintenance personnel found that for much of the time they were not touching aircraft at all, but were using technical logs, task cards, and maintenance manuals or were signing off tasks. The more unfamiliar the task, the more time was spent dealing with documentation.
Given the importance of paper records in maintenance, it is not surprising that poorly designed documents lie at the heart of many incidents. Procedures that are ambiguous, wordy, or repetitive are likely to promote errors. Numbering tech pubs in the civilian sector and in the non-civilian sector follow different guidelines.
