It is generally accepted that less vibration is better than more vibration. Potential benefits can include longer life to dynamic components, as well as second order benefits to other parts of the airframe to include longer life to avionics, component mounts, and the fuselage. Longer component life will lead to cost avoidance savings and better aircraft availability.

Cost savings implications for CDB go beyond the individual event of eliminating vibration or finding the source of the problem, as welcome as they are. The greater financial implications are to be realized over the life of the airframe. The CDB program can significantly maximize component life, not just in the drivetrain, but also throughout the airframe, to include avionics.

CDB can add many more years to the planned life of the Apache airframe, saving the user significant amount of money.

Aircraft owners agree that component vibration levels are deteriorating over time. Some aircraft platforms have monitoring systems that quickly become part of the maintenance process to try and identify or even solve vibration problems. (Where, when, why, etc..). When the onboard monitoring system is alerting for high vibrations, the maintenance procedures instructing the soldier to check a few options with the intention to try and find the root cause of the problem. At one point ('the spending point') the procedure calls for part replacements (before their TBO's) in order to continue to "try" and solve the problem. In most cases, the unit will replace parts until "they get the right combination" and the indicators will confirm that the vibrations are reduced. What is happening is that the root cause of the vibration problem is not eliminated, the vibration is just "reduced temporarily" by compensating for part replacement and the change contributes to the balancing of the aircraft. Since the root cause of the problem still exists, the vibration indicator will soon show high vibration and the unit will replace parts again. So, at one point ("the spending point") a maintenance process calls for component replacement as a way to try to solve vibration problems and put the aircraft back in service.

When the CDB Solution is applied, the entire aircraft is balanced and vibrations are reduced to very low limits by "eliminating the root cause of the problem". Under these new conditions, when the aircraft is flying more hours, the increase of vibration is less dramatic (very low vibration deterioration rate) and always below limits, therefore the aircraft never reaches the "spending point". Furthermore, in order to ensure that the aircraft will never reach the spending point, a CDB application may be applied every 250 flight hours and be part of routine maintenance process.

In the data taken from the Apache trials, we are seeing a shift from unscheduled to scheduled maintenance with a significant reduction in NMCM time. This reduction in unscheduled maintenance lifts the burden on the soldier in maintenance man-hours. Reducing unscheduled maintenance actions results in a reduction of indirect maintenance actions. Indirect maintenance actions occur when aircraft components and or special tools become damaged due to the performance of the unscheduled maintenance events.

Additional benefits include a smaller logistics footprint over time as dynamic components achieve greater on-aircraft time, which in turn reduces the logistical costs of getting components shipped to depot, depot costs of rebuilding, and shipping back to a unit. CDB also provides intangible results that are significant but difficult to measure such as Increased crew confidence in the aircraft, (sense of safety), enhanced aircraft performance and more...