So Creampuff I spent about 2 hours researching researching the "Waddington Effect" and honestly I didn't find much. Most seems to come back to AOPA pages and Sports Aviation Webpages. The same article Written by Mike Busch.
EAA Sport Aviation - March 2011
EAA Sport Aviation - March 2011
and this article which is half plagiarised from wikipedia
The Waddington Effect « Opinion Leaders
http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1HTKPYHY3-10D9MZ0-11ML/
Mike seems to have got his idea for this piece from a little history lesson article by Dr James Ignizio from the University of Texas. Dr James doesn't seem to any citations expect this paper
C. H. Waddington. "O. R. in World War 2: Operational Research against the U-boat", Elek Science, London, 1973.
Where its claimed that submarines are 20% less visible if painted white. Strangely they are still black now.
Wikipeda doesn't offer any clue to his CH Wallington war time activity's.
A Book :
Cognitive Biology: Dealing with Information from Bacteria to Minds
By Gennaro Auletta Refers to the WaddingTon effect in Biological terms
The major claim seems to be:
Once these recommendations were implemented, the number of effective flying hours of the RAF Coastal Command bomber fleet increased by 60 percent!
Of course this could be true but be careful with cause and effect..
So the only modern (post 1970's) reference I could find was in a MIT paper. Unfortunately the context of the paper is unclear.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/engineeri...event_main.pdf
It states "Impact of Waddington Effect = 1.4% Availability"
So your statement of
For a maintainer, maintenance never causes defects. However, an objective analysis of the data shows that maintenance not only sometimes causes defects, but that more maintenance more often always causes more defects.
seems nonsensical if it affects availability by 1.4%.
I wanted to find more. Hard facts!! But we are comparing a wartime environment to a Sigma Six environment. Many people in the war time environment would have been trained in a rush and working in adverse conditions. Now we have rules for maintenance hangars.
Okay that was thread drift but interesting bit of reading
