Website Integration: A Challenge for the FAA

The FAA deserves recognition for publishing material on the www.faa.gov website. While the site is sometimes difficult to navigate, almost everything the FAA does can be found there.

The FAA websites contain all the basics: airworthiness directives, regulations, advisory circulars, forms, type certificates, supplemental type certificates, etc. There are also unapproved parts notices, special airworthiness information bulletins, handbook bulletins, and more.

Putting all this on the web may be commendable, but that is just Step One in making use of the Internet. Now the FAA needs to move on to the next technological step. The Internet has grown from a simple cyber-location for published material into an integrated information tool. Consider an ordinary maintenance manual. Aircraft, engine, and component manufacturers moved into the modern age by publishing digitized versions of their manuals. The more progressive OEMs are adding features that make use of modern digital publishing and the Internet. While reading the manual, a technician might see a link to an applicable service bulletin. Click on the link and up pops the bulletin. If an airworthiness directive is associated with the bulletin, then that could be linked as well.

A truly modern manual would be serial-number specific and tied to the maintenance-tracking program that keeps track of applicable bulletins and inspection and service intervals. If a particular bulletin was not due for a few hundred hours, then it might still be an active link, but color-coded to reflect its not-yet-due status.

A new feature that we should expect soon is completion of the feedback loop between the technician and the factory. When a technician finds a mistake in a maintenance manual, there is currently no truly satisfactory way to submit that information. A technician ought to be able to click on a link, such as "Click here to send feedback directly to the OEM." An e-mail link to post critiques, comments, and corrections would be used far more often than the current postcard system.

But what about the FAA's data? Here's an example. The FAA is always complaining about the lack of good feedback to the Service Difficulty Reporting System database. Unless compelled to by regulation, most mechanics don't have time to fill out a Malfunction & Defect report, even though the FAA will accept such reports in any format, whether it be e-mail, paper, or fax. The database could be much more useful if all mechanics made a habit of writing up unusual discrepancies.

So, why not place a Malfunction & Defect reporting link right in the maintenance manual, where mechanics would see and use it? It would be easy to place such a link on every page of the manual. "Click here to submit a report about this component to the FAA database." That's a simple example that wouldn't cost a lot and would offer great benefits.

But there is a lot more FAA maintenance data that is just sitting there, data that could be put to great use in the right hands. Take the Beech T-34, which has had some problems. None of the data on the T-34 on FAA web pages is linked together. A mechanic could spend hours trying to find all this useful T-34 data.

What if the mechanic could go to an FAA master web page that lists all aircraft by manufacturer and model. Go to the T-34 master page, and all of the airworthiness directives, special airworthiness information bulletins, service bulletins, unapproved parts notices, flight standards airworthiness information bulletins, airworthiness handbook bulletins, maintenance alerts, etc. would be linked.

Not only would the links to all this information be located in one easy-to-find web page, but inside each document would be more links to other applicable documents. On the T-34, there is an egregious example of how not to do this. In AD2001-13-18, which came out after a wing failure during mock combat flying, the FAA refers to approved alternative means of compliance (AMOCs). Yet there is no information about those alternatives, published in an FAA special airworthiness information bulletin (SAIB). The electronic version of the SAIB should have a link to the AD and vice versa.

The FAA is headed in the right direction. There is a pilot project in the works to link FSAWs and HBAWs to make them easier to find. But until all of this information is connected, mechanics will need diligence and luck to ensure that they find all the information they need to do their jobs properly.