CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

The maintenance culture in Nigeria is very poor.  That is the reason why many factories collapse as a result of lack of preventive maintenance culture which leads to collapse of equipments, machines and the factory as a whole. Maintenance break down or preventive is very necessary for the continuing survival of a factory.  It is with good maintenance culture that appropriate sound and functional machinery, equipment and tools can be maintained which would facilitate continuing operation of and industry.  In a situation when parts are allowed to break down without replacement or servicing there would be system collapse which could lead to disruptions of production.  If equipment is not up to date and functional quality products and or services cannot be produced. In Nigeria, greed, non-challant attitude corruption and some other factors seriously impede maintenance culture and hence disruptions of production activities in factories.  When this occurs customers are not provided with choice and sometimes non-existence of the products or services is experienced.  Employees also suffer from the effects of non-maintenance culture in Nigeria. Infrastructural development is the basis and bedrock of any development effort in the world today. It is important to stress that, it is not enough for facilities of development to be put in place; it is more than enough for these facilities to be adequately and properly maintained so that the purpose for which they are meant would be accomplished. However, the attitude of people towards public facilities is that of government property that do not belong to anybody (Adeleye, 2009). To this extent facilities that were meant to benefit the masses are just rotting away, being wasted without being put to any good use as people are not interested in making such facilities sustainable. The result therefore, is that public facilities do not last long due to lack of maintenance. This shows that without a strong maintenance culture, infrastructural development will amount to nothing. The phrase maintenance culture could therefore be seen as an important one that should be defined to have a proper understanding of what it stands for in the process of sustainable development. Ajibola (2009) defines culture as “The shared belief and values of a group; the beliefs, customs, practices and social behavior of a particular nation or people”. He defined maintenance as “The work that is done regularly to keep a machine, building or a piece of equipment in good conditions”. He expatiated further that maintenance is a combination of actions carried out to retain an item in or to restore the item to an acceptable condition. When it comes to aircraft, the issue of age, you can think about it but again what you must focus on really is the serviceability. You could have an aircraft, maybe 52 years old. But it is still being effectively utilized for war. It’s your maintenance schedule. If you give it the best of maintenance, sometimes an aircraft that is even 20 years old may even be airworthier than the ones that are just about two years old. It depends on maintenance approach and the culture that you have been developed over the years.  The role of aircraft maintenance, simply put, is to ensure that aircraft presented “on the line” for flight operations comply with: all legal requirements (e.g. continuing airworthiness requirements, airworthiness directives, certificate of release to service, type certificate and supplementary type certificate),operational equipage requirements (e.g. oxygen systems, first aid, and flotation devices), and appropriate equipment for the type of operation being flown (e.g. communication, navigation and surveillance).Furthermore, where maintenance is conducted under contract by a third-party maintenance and repair organization, each airline customer may have other specific requirements (e.g. additional safety features, technical solutions, and issues such as in-flight entertainment and seating  aircraft discrepancy (physical degradation or failure) attributed to the actions of the aircraft maintenance technician”. Rankin (1997), in examining the experience of the Boeing organization, reports that improper maintenance contributes to 15 per cent of commercial jet accidents. Based on Boeing’s experience, Marx (1998) calculated that in the USA alone the number of commercial aircraft dispatched each year with a maintenance error is roughly 48,800. It is in this view the researcher want to assess the maintenance culture of Nigeria air force printing presses.