Page 42 - World Airnews Magazine May 2020 Edition

TECHNICAL
THE ARRIVAL OF THE
ELECTRONIC TECHNICAL
LOGBOOK FOR AIRCRAFT
By Kirk Strutt, Aerospace and Defence Product Manager
Kirk Strutt, Aerospace and
Defence Product Manager
Kirk has spent the last 20 years working
closely with numerous commercial
aviation organisations on aviation
maintenance management software
solutions.
As a senior product manager, he is
currently responsible for several products
within the IFS aerospace and defence
portfolio, where he works to understand
the business challenges facing the
industry; and how IFS software solutions
can best deliver long term value to the
market.
Prior to that, he has held a variety of
professional services, sales and product
development roles at Mxi Technologies, a
leading provider of aviation maintenance
management software that was acquired
by IFS in January 2017.
as they provide a view of all aircraft
maintenance activity, right down to every
he aircraft technical logbook nut and bolt.
Tplays a key role in aircraft turn- But the logbook itself exists as a
arounds. It is the primary communica- simple way of interacting between
tion tool between pilots and a main- maintenance organisation and pilot to
tenance organisation. Pilots can see minimise turnaround times. It essential-
the maintenance status of the aircraft ly acts as a micro maintenance system
and then report any faults back and - with the ability to sign-off work, track
deferred items and look at the history
forth with the maintenance team - but of what has recently been resolved and
efforts to digitise this process have so fixed on the aircraft. As such it is essen-
far been ineffective. tial to improving and optimising aircraft
The principal director in the Accen- turnaround times.
ture aerospace and defence practice, In a paper-based scenario, the pilot
Craig Gottlieb, recently went on record has to wait until they are at the aircraft
to say latest research shows A&D com- before seeing what deferrals are
panies are scaling more than 55% of associated with a flight. The pilot may
their digital proofs-of-concept to pro- have been handed a flight dispatch
duction. However, fewer than 20% of in a pre-flight briefing, but this may
them do so successfully to create last- not reflect the current status of an
ing benefit to their business. Electronic aircraft, often meaning they wouldn’t
aircraft technical logbooks would seem contain an up-to-date view of anything
to be one such development. last minute which took place on the
The over-arching benefit of a digitised inbound journey.
electronic technical logbook is to min-
imise silos of information between the TABLETS SOLVE ONE PROBLEM…
day of operations workforce -enabling Initial attempts to digitise this process
all stakeholders to work in unison to
make the aircraft serviceable and ready saw electronic technical logbooks
integrated into the aircraft itself,
to depart on time with passengers. which proved a complicated and costly
This incredibly paper-heavy process disaster as it required introducing
of aircraft technical logbooks seems flight proven hardware and software
the obvious target to digitise yet at- systems, not a viable solution.
tempts to do so have fallen far short of
Following that, things moved
the mark, mostly due to problems with forward with the advent of iPads
complexity of the solutions which have and other tablets being introduced
been brought forward. The result is an to the flight deck, which brought the
extremely low adoption rate of true
possibility to house maintenance data
electronic technical logbooks among on a portable mobile device. The main
commercial airlines. stumbling block here was that these
First let’s look at the reasons why
this has been the case. ‘paperless systems’ actually mirrored
the paper-based systems they were
trying to replace. Simply logging tasks
ELECTRONIC TECHNICAL manually into an iPad rather than pen
LOGBOOKS HISTORICALLY
PROVIDE COMPLEXITY, NOT to paper does not make electronic
technical logbooks a fully integrated
CLARITY, FOR AIRLINES system.
The issue with a paper-based aircraft …BUT A NEW DIGITISED
technical logbook is that all the infor- APPROACH IS REQUIRED
mation it houses essentially sits as a silo
outside the core maintenance system an From a cost-saving perspective every
airline may be using - regardless of the airline has now provided a pilot with
software provider an airline uses. These an iPad or tablet, to remove as much
paper as possible from the flight deck.
core maintenance systems are incredibly
granular and complex, for good reason Delivering the logbook over a tablet
World Airnews | May 2020
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