Maintenance technician's hand resting on an aircraft engine panel in a dim hangar — the human care behind predictive maintenance

Predictive Maintenance: A Cultural Shift

Predictive Maintenance: A Cultural Shift

Sustainability has been one of the defining drivers of both my career and my life outside of it. I believe deeply in the power of technical innovation — new engines, new fuels, new materials, all of it matters. But over time I’ve come to believe culture is more powerful still. Culture is the set of beliefs, values, customs, and behaviors we mostly don’t notice we’re following; a brilliant technology handed to a culture still wired to equate progress with replacing things faster will only travel so far on its own.

None of this is an argument against novelty. I genuinely love the creative process of discovering something new and building something completely different from what came before — that excitement is real, and it’s part of what drew me to engineering and to aviation in the first place. New aircraft, new propulsion, new materials are worth wanting: they’re part of how this industry actually gets greener, and better at serving people. What I find interesting is the question predictive maintenance quietly raises: not whether to replace things, but when replacement is genuinely the better choice, and when it’s simply the more exciting one.

In the last few years, working in aircraft maintenance gave me another angle on this. It’s an industry built on precision, caution, and respect for the object in front of you — nothing gets touched, repaired, or replaced without a documented reason. And yet, until recently, almost nobody had actually measured what all that careful work costs, or saves, environmentally.

This piece is about that overlooked corner. Aviation’s sustainability conversation has a clear centre of gravity: at the 77th IATA Annual General Meeting in Boston, on 4 October 2021, member airlines committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and the Net Zero roadmaps that followed lay out, step by step, what needs to happen across aircraft technology, energy infrastructure, operations, finance, and policy to get there. It’s a genuinely comprehensive plan — and almost all of the attention it has generated has gone to new aircraft, new engines, sustainable aviation fuel, and electric or hydrogen propulsion.

Maintenance rarely makes that list. That’s the gap I want to talk about.

An overlooked piece of the puzzle

Maintenance’s environmental footprint isn’t invisible in the numbers so much as it’s been unmeasured. A 2022 study commissioned by EASA on the environmental sustainability of the Aviation Maintenance and Production (M&P) domain makes this explicit: while emissions from fuel burn understandably dominate the conversation, maintenance, production, and end-of-life have “traditionally been targeted less” by sustainability research than flight operations. We’ve spent two decades optimizing what happens in the air, and comparatively little effort understanding what happens in the hangar.

That started to change in 2024, when a team from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and TU Delft published the first detailed life-cycle assessment (LCA) of aircraft maintenance, using an Airbus A320 as a case study (Rahn et al., 2024). Their conclusion is worth sitting with: maintenance activities account for roughly 1% of an aircraft’s total environmental footprint over its life cycle. On the surface, that sounds like a rounding error — easy to see why researchers focused elsewhere.

But the same study makes a second point that matters more than the headline number: as aircraft technology evolves to cut in-flight emissions, the share of maintenance in the overall footprint will grow. Shrink the biggest slice of the pie — flight operations — and every other slice, including maintenance, automatically gets proportionally bigger. What is negligible today won’t stay negligible.

What the data actually shows

The DLR/TU Delft study didn’t stop at the 1% headline; it broke maintenance down check by check, and some of what it found is genuinely counter-intuitive:

  • The daily check — the shortest, simplest inspection an aircraft undergoes — is the single largest contributor to maintenance-related emissions, responsible for nearly 35% of the total. Not because any one daily check is intensive, but because there are so many of them: a typical narrow-body performs more than 2,000 maintenance events a year. Frequency beats intensity.
  • The D-check — the heaviest, most complex maintenance event, including cabin refurbishment and repainting — accounts for about 20%, despite happening only once every six years.
  • Hangar and ground-equipment energy — lighting, heating, cooling, powering tools — makes up roughly two-thirds of the total impact. Not exotic materials, not rare alloys: electricity.
  • Discarded and replaced components (filters, spare parts, tires) account for another 21%. Among individual systems, the landing gear stands out, largely due to routine tire replacement and shop visits.

There’s also an operational wrinkle worth knowing: aircraft flying mostly short-haul routes showed a higher maintenance footprint per flight hour than long-haul aircraft, because more frequent take-off-and-landing cycles trigger maintenance thresholds more often, even though total flight hours accumulate more slowly. Maintenance impact, in other words, doesn’t scale simply with distance flown — it scales with how an aircraft is used.

None of this makes maintenance the villain of aviation’s environmental story. It makes it a lever nobody had properly measured, let alone pulled.

Why the future adds weight, not just relevance

Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone betting on greener aircraft. The same research line notes that newer propulsion concepts — batteries, fuel cells, hydrogen storage systems — are not automatically lower-maintenance than the technology they replace. Because these components tend to have shorter service lives than the systems they’re substituting, they may actually increase maintenance demand even as they cut in-flight emissions to near zero.

Put the two effects together — a shrinking flight-emissions slice, and a maintenance slice that may itself grow in absolute terms — and you get a future where maintenance activity is a materially bigger part of aviation’s environmental equation than it is today. We are, in effect, building tomorrow’s maintenance culture on today’s aircraft, using today’s technology. Whatever we learn now about running a predictive, data-driven maintenance operation is something we won’t have to improvise from scratch once the greener aircraft actually show up.

This is the cultural shift I think predictive maintenance represents. It’s not primarily a cost play or an efficiency play, even though it delivers both. It’s a rehearsal. It trains an organization — its engineers, its planners, its data systems, its habits — to replace components based on evidence of actual degradation rather than fixed calendar intervals, to intervene early instead of reactively, and to treat “produce less” as a default rather than an exception. That mindset, once built, transfers directly to whatever aircraft and propulsion systems come next.

What predictive maintenance changes today

Even before we get to tomorrow’s aircraft, predictive maintenance is already doing useful work on today’s fleet. A 2025 study modeling AI-based predictive maintenance across five aircraft subsystems — fuel regulator, turbine nozzle, lubricant pump, environmental control system, and hydraulic actuator — found energy savings of up to roughly 14–15%, load reductions of up to nearly 14% on the most stressed components, and fault-detection accuracy (AUC) as high as 0.96 using LSTM neural networks trained on real flight-sensor data (Zayer et al., 2025). Translated into cost terms, the same components showed fuel-cost savings in the range of 7–9%, which at fleet scale adds up quickly.

Findings from predictive maintenance in industrial settings more broadly (outside aviation specifically) point in the same direction — studies reviewed by Saxena (2024) report organizations achieving 20–30% reductions in energy use and 25–40% reductions in material waste after adopting predictive strategies, largely by avoiding unnecessary part replacements and catching inefficient equipment operation before it escalates. Those numbers won’t transfer one-for-one to aviation’s much more tightly regulated maintenance environment, but the underlying mechanism is the same one aviation is starting to exploit: knowing when something actually needs attention, instead of guessing on a schedule.

The everyday version of this is intuitive once you say it out loud. A well-maintained aircraft simply burns less fuel. Engine washing and compressor cleaning restore efficiency that grime and buildup quietly erode. Correct tire pressure, healthy brakes, and proper wheel alignment reduce drag and rolling resistance. Catching a small issue before it becomes a major repair saves both materials and energy — and every year an aircraft or component stays safely in service is a year that a new one didn’t have to be manufactured, mined, machined, and shipped to replace it.

This is also where the sustainability push is already visibly changing MRO facilities, independent of any single technology: water-recycling systems that capture and reuse water from aircraft washing, a shift toward lighter and more durable composite materials that reduce both fuel burn and repair frequency, and the move to paperless, digital maintenance records that cut waste while making data — the same data predictive maintenance depends on — instantly accessible and accurate.

The bigger picture

When people picture sustainable aviation, they usually picture new aircraft designs or alternative fuels. Both matter enormously. But one of the most effective ways to reduce aviation’s environmental impact is far less visible: maintaining what already exists, and building the tools and habits to do that with less waste and less guesswork.

That’s the core of it: the greenest product is often the one you don’t have to manufacture.

Predictive maintenance is how we get better, today, at not having to. And in doing so, it quietly prepares the culture — the processes, the data discipline, the decision-making — that tomorrow’s greener aircraft will need on day one.

I keep coming back to this because it’s the same lesson I take from sustainability more broadly: the technology rarely arrives first. The culture that knows what to do with it has to be built beforehand, in small, deliberate steps, on whatever tools we already have. Predictive maintenance, for me, is exactly that kind of step.

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Marco Crescenzi
Marco Crescenzi

I manage complex international programs in aerospace — and I write books. Poetry, fiction, and reflections on leadership and technology. Because the best leaders, like the best authors, know that every challenge is first of all a human story.

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