Tele-Maintenance Developments

Technology is finally winging its way into aviation, leading to many new applications that are leveraging modern computer systems to help manufacturers and maintenance service providers better serve their customers and improve the flow of communication.

Early uses of technology were simple: using e-mail to communicate with customers is nearly universal, for example. The next step was adapting the World Wide Web to the customer support function with systems such as Dallas Airmotive’s Turbine Update, Lufthansa A.E.R.O.’s LUCIS, and Rolls-Royce’s aeromanager, which allow customers instant access to status information on their engine projects.

Maintenance technology is now moving beyond Web-based support systems into wireless communication of trend and diagnostic data, and there are interesting developments in this arena, too.

Notwithstanding all of the applications of technology, there is one fundamental issue that these systems are designed to address and that remains an important feature: these systems—from e-mail to what some are labeling “telematics” or “tele-maintenance”—are designed to help improve communications between service providers and customers. “We have to emphasize,” said Poligenis Panagiotis, manager marketing and sales for engine overhauler Lufthansa A.E.R.O., “that we view this tool as an additional communication medium and it is at no time replacing our direct communications with our customer.”

“We’re not using this to replace that personal contact,” agreed Mike Cumnock, vice president of customer service at Dallas Airmotive. “This supplements what we’re doing face-to-face or over the phone with our customers.

 

“We developed Turbine Update,” he added, “not to replace our current communication vehicles with customers, but to add to it. We developed the system to allow the customer to go online to monitor the progress of their engine while in repair or overhaul.”

 

Before launching Turbine Update, Dallas Airmotive surveyed customers to see what they wanted in a Web-based customer support system. Dallas Airmotive introduced Turbine Update four years ago, and the system’s use by customers has grown quickly. Repeat customers tend to be the most comfortable with using Turbine Update, and international customers use Turbine Update almost exclusively because they can check the progress of their engines at any time of the day, no matter what time it is at the Dallas Airmotive facility where their engine is undergoing repair or overhaul.

Faster communications

Dallas Airmotive’s Turbine Update, as Cumnock explained, doesn’t replace more traditional communications but adds a new way for customers to obtain information. When the customer’s engine arrives at a Dallas Airmotive facility, the customer service representative holds a briefing with the customer and in addition to typical engine issues, discusses the customer’s communications expectations. “How do you want us to communicate with you?” Cumnock said. Some customers still prefer telephone and fax, others like e-mail, and many rely on Turbine Update.

 

While Turbine Update doesn’t necessarily speed up the engine turn-time, it does facilitate faster communication with the customer. “By allowing people to go into Turbine Update,” Cumnock said, “it’s a call they don’t have to make to a customer service rep.” If customer input is needed on a repair/replace decision or some other issue, the information about the problem, including photos and other supporting data, is available on Turbine Update, and the customer can respond quickly with a decision. “This keeps turn-time on track,” he said.

There is a plan to use the Turbine Update technology, which runs on Dallas Airmotive’s Avexus software system, to reduce turn-times even further. If the information for the engine, the logbook data, engine history, and configuration, can be electronically input into Turbine Update before the engine arrives, then the entire process will take less time, said Cumnock, because Dallas Airmotive will then be able to “do a better job of provisioning, staffing, and [planning] the workflow.”

Lufthansa A.E.R.O. Customer Information System (LUCIS) is used by most customers, according to A.E.R.O.’s Panagiotis. The system is updated twice per day and provides milestone information as the engine progresses through the company’s Alzey, Germany facility. Customers can view photos of their engine, as on Turbine Update, and provide quick feedback to A.E.R.O. reps to keep the job flowing.

A handy LUCIS feature is the ability to output the engine report in Adobe pdf format, which is easy to e-mail around to anyone who needs to see the report.

Improving connectivity

Rolls-Royce offers a web-based system called aeromanager, which acts a central clearing-house for all Rolls-Royce engine information that customers might need, from technical publications to engine slot requests to overhaul status and parts ordering. Also available is Rolls-Royce’s aftermarket services, which covers everything from arranging lease engines to obtaining special tools, AOG support, warranty claims, and training. The aftermarket services page includes a direct link to the enginedatacenter, where customers can access trend monitoring and diagnostic data for their engines. The enginedatacenter, as it is labeled on the Rolls-Royce website, is a service provided by Data Systems & Solutions, a Rolls-Royce and SAIC joint venture.

The aeromanager system, which is used by all Rolls-Royce engine overhaul shops, was announced in 2000, and the first 15 customers went live in 2001. The number of external customers that now use aeromanager is about 600, according to Peter Withers, Rolls-Royce operations manager for technical support and operations. Most large engine operators are aeromanager users and about half of all corporate operators running Rolls-Royce engines, he said.

Aeromanager is updated daily via Rolls-Royce’s SAP enterprise resource management computer software system, and customers can view this information at any time from virtually any web-enabled computer. “Actual use is increasing,” Withers said. “Traditionally, the updates sent to customers were through e-mail. But the big problem is reliance upon specific parties being in their office to see [the e-mail]. Most operators are very keen on the web interface, although some prefer traditional methods.”

The added value of trend and diagnostic monitoring via Data Systems & Solutions benefits both operators and Rolls-Royce. The monitoring started with operators of large engines, especially those enrolled in Rolls-Royce’s Total Care package. “With Total Care,” Withers said, “it’s essential to know how engines are performing on-wing.” The data helps Rolls-Royce and the airline determine the optimum time to remove an engine for routine maintenance and also helps plan for spares provisioning so that expensive parts are called for only when absolutely necessary. “That’s what customers like,” he said, “as smooth as possible.”

While Withers expects use of the web as a communications medium to increase with Rolls-Royce customers, there are still plenty of areas where web access is limited. Rolls-Royce is thus careful to design the aeromanager interface so that customers with slow web access still have a satisfactory experience. “There aren’t a lot of clever animations,” he said. “As ‘net connectivity increases and more people get faster connections, we’ll see them start to use [the web] far more.”

With improved connectivity, Rolls-Royce plans to use the web more as a primary customer interface. “We’re thinking about sharing information with the airline’s back-office systems,” Withers said. “How much integration can take place across that level, I don’t think we understand.” But clearly, this is the direction customer support via the web is taking at Rolls-Royce and the result will be better knowledge by both the engine manufacturer/service provider and the customer/end user.

Customer is part of the process

Maintenance provider Lufthansa Technik has debuted a new system that leverages web technology well beyond what the company’s A.E.R.O. division’s LUCIS system offers. Lufthansa Technik’s manage/m system, also known as the Maintenance Operation WebSuite, offers a variety of services that are easy to implement because they are all web-based.

Manage/m includes 12 applications ranging from the technical log for aircraft defect reporting to configuration control, reliability tracking, scheduling, layover progress and event planning, condition-monitoring, manpower resource tracking, ramp maintenance control, quality monitoring, job cards, and job control where customers can monitor the status of their aircraft.

Lufthansa Technik and its customers both use manage/m, according to a Lufthansa Technik spokesman, “because customers and the Lufthansa Technik staff work on the same database. It is therefore ensured that we have no discrepancies. Since the customer is part of the process, he can contribute with his comments directly in the corresponding systems so that we can produce our service faster, more specifically, and effectively.”

The m/condition module of manage/m uses Arinc’s ACARS network to transmit data in flight to the manage/m ground module.

SmartSignal is a pure data-analysis company, specializing in engine condition trend monitoring for turbine engine operators including airlines and electrical powerplants. So far, SmartSignal has two airline customers, Delta Air Lines with 1,100 engines and Southwest Airlines with more than 400 engines on the SmartSignal program.

Data from onboard sensors is delivered in low-bandwidth transmissions via Arinc’s ACARS network. “It takes snapshot data at certain points in flight,” said David Bell, SmartSignal vice president, application engineering. “Maybe only 10 to 15 snapshots per day.”

While more operators are equipping aircraft with high-bandwidth broadband communications networks that can send and receive much larger volumes of data, Bell doesn’t see a large potential for maintenance data transmission via these broadband systems. For flight crews, the priority for this bandwidth, he said, is weather and dispatch information. “Engine condition trend monitoring is a small portion. We applied our solution to [the system] that is available, not what is possible.

But broadband systems could make it possible to capture data from many other sensors installed in modern aircraft, he added, besides just the engines. “Bringing down more data,” he said, “from other types of components in the aircraft would allow us to catch more failure modes earlier. Broadband capacity certainly could do that. If the bandwidth is there, there’s nothing about the computational side that wouldn’t allow you to go faster than that.”

The benefit of automatic transmission of trend information is that it removes obstacles that hinder the flow of data. “Our experience,” Bell said, “has been that whenever you need to rely on human intervention to capture and relay data, reliability drops. It really needs to be fully automatic.”

As bandwidth increases and aircraft become more “wired,” SmartSignal will be ready to analyze all the trend data that starts flowing. “We’re not into data collection or sensors,” Bell said. “We’re independent of the hardware. Typically we follow the infrastructure. It’s a lot easier to talk about being able to extract value from the infrastructure that you have instead of adding more infrastructure. Broadband connectivity needs to be justified for some other reason, then trend-monitoring solutions can run on top of that. That’s the experience we’re seeing in other industries.”

As an aircraft manufacturer, Boeing has approached the infrastructure issue incrementally, adding technological capability both in Boeing’s own support systems and increasingly on customers’ aircraft. Connexion by Boeing, the broadband communications system that allows passengers to use the Internet in flight, could serve as a conduit for transmission of sensor data. About 80 customer aircraft operated by nine airlines are Connexion equipped, and more are on the way.

One step into maintenance technology for Boeing was development of its MyBoeingFleet web portal, which is the central repository of all the information Boeing operators need for operation of their aircraft. MyBoeingFleet is in its sixth year and now serves more than 800 airlines and 40,000 individual users as much as a terabyte of data every month. (A terabyte equals about 189,000 pages of text.) Much of the data accessed by customers is some of the 250,000 maintenance documents that Boeing has put online and more than 5 million engineering drawings.

Collaboration environment

MyBoeingFleet is more than just a repository of documents. Boeing also uses the system to leverage the knowledge that is already available to solve customers’ problems. One example is the fleet team collaboration environment, where airlines can discuss common problems in a forum environment. If one airline has already solved a particular problem, why duplicate the effort if that information is already available? “In the past,” said Barb Claitman, director of Boeing Commercial Airplane Services information technology, “they would pick up the phone or use e-mail. With fleet team resolution, it provides a structured environment, like a bulletin board, to post challenges, and other airlines can see it and chime in.”

Boeing’s field service representatives have access to another part of Boeing’s technology called reusable solutions. This system is a database of problems that have already been solved, and the field service rep can mine this database to get much quicker access to a solution.

The benefits of all this web activity have not only helped customers, Claitman explained, but Boeing, too. “When we made [all this information] available through MyBoeingFleet,” she said, “we got rid of a whole bunch of paper. And it frees up our engineering staff to focus on the hard stuff.

“When we implemented MyBoeingFleet in 2000,” she added, “we knew that the world was going to change and over time there would be more capability. We have this wealth of information that will help airlines be more predictive about their needs and shorten cycle times. We knew there would be broadband off the airplane. Airlines are in the infancy of real-time interaction.”

There are many other applications on MyBoeingFleet that help customers save time and money, and more capability is being added constantly. One of the newest online products is the Airplane Health Management (AHM) service, which began operational use with Singapore Airlines in February 2004.

“AHM is looking historically at what we can learn from maintenance activities on the airplane,” Claitman explained. AHM acts as sort of a central hub for maintenance information, collecting and relaying operational, trend, and diagnostic data from the airplane to the ground, while the airplane is flying. Data comes from the airplane’s central maintenance computer, condition-monitoring systems, and electronic flight bag (777-300ER only, so far), which collects discrepancies logged by pilots. The real benefit of AHM is not just knowing what needs to be fixed by the time the airplane lands, but that it converts non-routine maintenance problems into scheduled (or schedule-able) tasks. Anytime maintenance surprises can be eliminated, maintenance productivity naturally improves.

In 2007, Boeing plans to offer AHM Release 3.0, which will take advantage of broadband systems to deliver a continuous real-time stream of maintenance data to ground stations.

Broadband connectivity is going to work the other way, too, according to Chris Kettering, director of the e-Enabled program, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. As aircraft systems become more software-driven, constant updates need to be done to navigation databases, engine fadec systems, and avionics LRUs. It would be much easier to upload this information to the airplane through a broadband connection rather than the current system, which uses multiple dataloaders that have to be tracked and managed. A side benefit would be the ability to get some critical information disseminated to flight crews quickly, such as a sudden FAA NOTAM (notice to airmen) that affects a particular flight.

Kettering sees another opportunity, the technical helper who can log into the airplane’s systems in flight and see a problem developing. “Probably no one’s going to take control of an airplane,” he said, “but I can see someone in maintenance logging on in real-time and seeing what the pilot is seeing.”

The key way to think about all this, Kettering explained, is that “the airplane is this incredibly intelligent entity that is removed from key parts of the infrastructure during flight.” By allowing this intelligent airplane to be hooked up to the network via broadband connections, all sorts of opportunities present themselves. “The way we benefit from it,” he added, “is increased reliability and availability. It’s an exciting time for us.”

Embedded in the fadec

Qualtech Systems is approaching the tele-maintenance opportunity by jumping onboard its customers’ systems. Qualtech was selected by Pratt & Whitney to provide embedded diagnostic software that will be integrated into the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s F135 engine Prognostics & Health Management system (PHM).

While Pratt & Whitney hasn’t asked Qualtech to deliver airborne transmission of the diagnostic information, that is certainly possible, according to Somnath Deb, Qualtech vice president for engineering. “It doesn’t matter how you send the data. The process is the same.” PHM, he added, “is [eventually] going to be part of the fadec. Our software initially is on the Prognostic Health Assistance Module. Then it will merge with the fadec.”

Qualtech’s software is designed to narrow down problems so that maintenance crews can quickly swap out bad components. “There are roughly 1,600 health resolution codes,” said Deb, “and maybe up to 15 possible causes behind each code. If you can isolate it to the line-replaceable component, you can replace it. That is our goal.

An advantage of having software like Qualtech’s embedded in the engine’s fadec is, according to Deb, that “we not only assess what’s wrong, but also what’s right.” Knowing what is working properly in the engine is much better than an unknown element because an unknown could be working or not working. “It’s very important not to have these unknowns,” he said.

Qualtech also built an integrated maintenance system for Sikorsky Aircraft’s SH-60B and CH47D helicopter engines. Sikorsky estimated that such a system could save millions of dollars per year on engine maintenance for a fleet of 500 of each model. Add Qualtech’s software to all the other systems on those helicopters and the cost of adding the software is paid for in just six months, according to Qualtech.

Qualtech is looking to expand into the commercial aviation market with maintenance diagnostic and analysis tools. “I think there is a market there for lots of things on the commercial side,” Deb said. “We are working with a major airframe manufacturer. They’re interested in onboard remote tele-diagnosis systems. When the aircraft is [grounded], the cost is absolutely huge.”

Managing unscheduled events

Honeywell plans to begin testing of its own telematics system for Honeywell TFE 731 and HTF-series engines around the end of this year. “We are using the word ‘telematics,’” said Gary Bird, product portfolio leader for telematics and diagnostics. “[This means] using wireless technologies and tapping into various sources of data and sensors that are onboard a vehicle and connecting it to the ground-based systems and support structures.”

The goal, he explained, is to use the telematics system for “diagnostics, prognostics, and logistics support and ultimately connect that back through some kind of network to improve service operations, so we can sense faster and respond smarter.”

Current technology infrastructure for aircraft maintenance is cumbersome. “Today the operators of aircraft, including our equipment, have to manhandle data off the aircraft,” Bird said. Operators use laptop computers, cables, floppy discs, and all sorts of equipment that, he said, “most of us have forgotten in other industries. [We want] to make it more transparent and simplify that whole experience.”

Honeywell’s second reason for going the telematics route, he added, “is we want to focus on helping [operators] manage maintenance and unscheduled events. Catch them sooner and fix them faster. This creates more value, increases availability, and lowers costs.”

The telematics tests will involve a device that plugs into the digital electronic engine controller (DEEC) on the TFE 731, which will transmit data to the ground via the GSM cellular network and the Internet. Data will include cycles, hours, faults, exceedances, and event and performance parameters. Once that data is received at Honeywell’s data center, it will be parsed and decoded then placed in a structured and secure database. Software will then issue alerts for any faults or exceedances and notify appropriate personnel. The system will also use trending and structured diagnostics to analyze the engine constantly, Bird said, “using a lot of technology we’ve been developing for some time using model-based diagnostics between LRUs and subsystems and larger systems. This will more quickly isolate what the issue is.”

What Honeywell is doing is first steps in trying to eliminate bottlenecks in the maintenance of fleets of aircraft. Manual downloading of maintenance data is one major bottleneck. When one person is responsible for plugging a laptop into an airplane or a system, downloading the data, making sure the data is protected, and delivering the data to the right place, that process “is open to a lot of variability,” said Bird. “Integrity can’t be maintained in a laptop. This system manages security and accuracy and delivery to the data center where the information is managed. Telematics allows us to do that. Manual download doesn’t.”

Once the delivery bottleneck is solved, then what to do with the data is just as important. “You don’t want to collect everything just because,” he said. While the cost of processing and storage and bandwidth all are dropping quickly, “the cost is not in storing or transmitting, but analyzing. You have terabytes of data but no ability to analyze [it all]. The challenge is making sense of that.”

In the near term, Bird sees Honeywell’s telematics system helping to “take away all the things [technicians] have to do that are just cumbersome, and allow them to focus on what they were hired for, keeping the aircraft available.” Telematics can eliminate a lot of paper-handling, downloading, and research. It could offer technicians the ability to train just-in-time before performing a task only when that task is necessary, avoiding much wasted training time on tasks that rarely need to be accomplished.

“What this evolves to is really a shift to more condition-based maintenance,” Bird said. “Once you have more experience and data-driven activities, you can use that experience and historical data to help you manage inspection periods and move towards evidence-based inspection.” As aircraft-to-ground bandwidth increases, the speed of sharing information improves dramatically, which hastens the transfer of information from the aircraft, which has the problem, to the people who can effect a solution. This, Bird said, “increases the precision at which you can respond. Sense faster, detect smarter. That’s where it should be headed and where I would like to see it go.”

Where is all this technology headed? The answer is simple: in the not-too-distant future, first airliners then business jets will be equipped with real-time telemetry systems as sophisticated as those used today for new aircraft development and flight testing. These telematic systems will deliver a constant stream of information to moni tors—both human and computer—on the ground. Nothing will be withheld; there will be no secrets or missing data on future aircraft. The quality of the data will be so high that someday—perhaps soon—a pilot is going to receive a message in flight from a telematics operator warning that an engine is about to shred itself and that a precautionary shutdown will maximize safety and minimize repair costs. As with every new development, the FAA is going to have to figure out procedures to allow operators to deal with these types of situations in a way that preserves safety and enhances efficiency. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that telematics or tele-maintenance has the potential to prevent and minimize many types of maintenance problems.