TECH TALK DIGITAL AIRCRAFT RECORDS: THE TIME IS NOW BY JOHN PAWLICKI | OPM RESEARCH
This column has been charting the march of the aviation industry as it digitizes every aspect of itself, from simple aircraft parts becoming software-enabled, automated supply chain transactions, to all types of aircraft and ground communications. Digital business is a fact of life now, impacting any industry touching upon electronics, communications and software. With the greater advent of automated machine-to-machine communications (removing error- prone, expensive and slow humans out of the loop), not only will aircraft be able to process more data more effectively and quicker, but ground- based systems (ERP/MRO/etc.) are already doing so as well. The industry has been transitioning from paper to digital for some years now for many previously manually-driven processes, as well as due to cloud computing (which reduces archiving costs) and greater industry standards for how data and forms are structured electronically. (Data records are more transferable to business partners who may have different software solutions.) In fact, if we focus down onto the
area of aircraft records and supporting data and processes around them, clear trends have emerged these past few years. In a previous column, I had discussed how technologies such as Blockchain (which is a tamper-proof block of data, forms, transactions — which underpins Bitcoin, the virtual currency) will eventually revolutionize how the entire air transport industry will exchange information, and will be able to trust such data. Financial companies are quickly expanding their use of blockchain-based mechanisms by which to handle their transactions,
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and this has been expanding out to most industries at a slower rate. If the banks can find a way to reduce their costs and streamline their operations in such a manner, aviation needs to follow as well. This is already being used for travel-related purposes by SITA, and other efforts are underway in aviation using this technology. A combination of blockchain,
industry-wide data and cyber standards, and cloud computing will drive further changes in many of the aircraft-related records keeping processes we see today.
DIGITAL AIRCRAFT RECORDS This niche has become quite competitive from a vendor standpoint in the past decade, and we have been seeing the large OEMs buy out some of the solution vendors. Boeing purchased AerData back in 2014, and GE purchased Critical Technologies (owners of AirVault) in March of this year. To paraphrase one of the industry pundits, although the material making up the physical aircraft would appear to be the asset, without the aircraft records, the physical aircraft would be practically worthless. For example, prospective buyers or lessees will be much better able to assess an aircraft, engine or part of its value by searching thru indexed digital records, making it less stressful for both sides of the transaction.
While this phrase has always been
true, it is truer today than at any previous time. In the past, due to the dependence upon paper records, recordkeeping of all sorts might not always been as good as it could have been. But such excuses are no longer acceptable, as it is becoming
easier and less expensive to use digital records today. We are seeing a shift in how
business processes revolving around aircraft records are affected by this digital records evolution. This is part of a greater movement globally in all industries where all forms of recordkeeping are becoming wider and deeper, as data analysis tools (commonly referred to as part of the Big Data movement) shifts to more of ‘information governance’. The swing to a more comprehensive and proactive management of information as it progresses through the entire business life cycle is upon us. Such a new focus will have a positive impact upon counterfeit parts and other fraud which was supported by tampered or fake records. This will cause regulatory
authorities to change how we implement todays required forms, reports, approvals and each and every process which supports this. An example of this is how you can deliver all of the data required when returning an aircraft off of a lease, with reams of data to prove its value and current state. Many of the software vendors who are making this process easier (along with the maintenance and aftermarket processes which generate much of the data which feeds into this) are doing so with PDF files, and/or some form of data archived in databases. In the near future, when everyone is using applications which support ATA/A4A Spec 2000 XML data standards, it might be possible to make such a transaction no more difficult than executing a command on a PC/smartphone and a complete data dump will occur. The ATA/
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