Embraer has revised the scheduled maintenance requirements for its Phenom family of jets. The revision extends the intervals between stops from 600 flight hours and/or 12 months and multiples to 800 flight hours or 12 months and multiples. Most of the tasks with double intervals were also optimised to the longest period.

This is a 33 per cent maintenance interval improvement, which is almost double the industry average. To Phenom series customers, this significant improvement equates to less downtime, lower maintenance costs, a long economic life and more time in the air.

The improvement was made possible, says Embraer, by the performance of the Phenom fleet over the last decade. More than one year of engineering analysis confirmed that the customers of these aircraft can fully benefit from the high availability of the fleet for better convenience and greater flexibility.

“Conceived as clean-sheet designs to be the best in their respective classes, the Phenom 100 and 300 series aircraft were built for high utilisation. Now, eleven years after the first delivery, with a fleet of over 900 jets in operation, our customer support and engineering team can reaffirm, once again, that our products are even better than the initial specification,” says Johann C. Bordais, president and CEO of Embraer Services and Support.

The scheduled maintenance requirements for the Phenom jets were developed to meet the specific needs of business aviation and are based on the Maintenance Steering Group (MSG-3) methodology. The methodology aims to preserve and restore the inherent safety and reliability levels of the aircraft and to build a knowledge base for design and maintenance improvement. The main benefits of this methodology include higher aircraft availability and overall cost reduction to keep the aircraft in ideal operating conditions.

The Phenom fleet has accumulated more than 1.7 million flight hours and 1.4 million cycles since the first delivery of the Phenom 100 in December 2008.