Aircraft Data Management: What Are The Biggest Challenges and What Can You Do

As mentioned in our previous blog ‘What is Aircraft Data Management and why is it important’, within aviation, data management is essential for airworthiness, safety, asset value and efficiency. An airline and its aircraft generate a large amount of data, which must be collected and organized to be useful. This data can include everything from part certificates, flight log data, maintenance work orders, Tech logs, weather conditions to engine performance and logbooks.

What are the biggest challenges?

The data in an airline's system is the lifeblood of any operations, but it can also be a challenge to manage. The need to store and manage this information is only growing, but so too does the rate at which it's created. Some of the top challenges airlines face are:

Lack of data insight

Data from an increasing number and variety of sources such as sensors, MRO/FlightOps systems is being collected and stored. However, none of that data is useful if the airlines don’t know what data it has, where it is, and how to use it.

Collect, store, and validate data effectively

In the world of data management, airlines store data in multiple systems. Collecting and identifying the data itself doesn’t provide any value—an airline needs to process it. The problem with this process is that it can take up a lot of time and effort for airlines to get the data they need into a usable format. An airline needs a way to quickly and easily transform data from its original format into the shape, format, or model they need it to be. A next step is to put all data into a system or central place to be able to fully validate it.

Manage and trust data constantly

Having large amounts of data available but the quality is lacking, the output is flawed. Everyone knows the world-famous rubbish in is rubbish out. Keeping your aircraft data healthy and maintaining the single source of truth is a continuous job. It is necessary to be on top of things to prevent flawed data. Human error is natural after all, and more data is added to the systems daily resulting in constant changes. Plus, tons of rows of new data are created by the aircraft every day and added to the systems so it’s quite challenging to keep the overview and identify issues. This means an airline needs a quick and trustworthy way to check all data to address any issues as soon as they appear and are still manageable, to prevent things spiralling out of control to keep trust and confidence in the aircraft data, at all times.

Lack of skills and knowledge to create value from data

The ultimate step is to drive value from data. This is only possible with the right people or partner with that have the skills and knowledge to create this value.  Making a pie chart in excel is not difficult but managing a data warehouse and presenting information in a logical cognitive matter is a field of its own.

How it can be done - Example

Our customer Etihad has embarked the journey of a proper data management strategy with the goal to achieve a vision of a data-driven technical organization enhancing safety performance, operational efficiency & financial control. During this year’s Airline and Aerospace MRO and Flight Operations IT conference Gavin Gronert together with our CEO Sander de Bree has explained more in detail their strategy and how they can achieve it. EXSYN played a major role in the creation of the foundation – making data accessible and available for everyone, creating a data quality status that it can be trusted so that Etihad is now able to drive value from it.

Click on below button to view the full presentation

Benefits of good data management

A well-executed data management strategy can help airlines gain potential competitive advantages over their business rivals, both by improving operational effectiveness and enabling better decision-making. It can help to avoid data breaches, and regulatory compliance problems that could damage an airline’s reputation, add unexpected costs, and put the organization in legal jeopardy. As mentioned in our previous blog post issues related to airworthiness and maintenance data can result in audit findings, grounding of aircraft, or hindering in following digitization initiatives. Ultimately, the biggest benefit that a solid approach to data management can provide is better business performance.

If No solid data management strategy is in place, what to do next  

1.      Set up a data management strategy and clearly identify your business goals

As always, the first step is identifying the airline’s goals. Setting goals will help determine the process for collecting, storing, managing, cleaning, and analyzing data. Clearly defined business objectives ensure to only keep and organize data that is relevant.

2.      Analyse what kind of data is stored and where is it stored

Next you need to identify what kind of data you need to achieve the goals and where to find it. But it does not stop here. As mentioned above it is important to have reliable data, thus it is necessary to put a process in place to improve the quality of that data. So also think of:

• we lack any data or is it still available in paper-based form?

• What is the quality and integrity of the data?

• How can we improve the data quality and uphold it?

3.      Identify if all the tools and people are in place to roll out the strategy

Sometimes the biggest challenge in using data effectively is that the organization’s data owners are not data experts. A critical part will be to provide the knowledge and skills the airline needs to analyze and understand the data. This could mean putting data analysis tools in the hands of departments outside of IT or getting buy-in from the airline’s leadership to support data initiatives.

Do you need help with your aircraft data? Starting with identifying where all the necessary data is stored, collecting and validating it, and getting it into the right format. Gaining the trust back in all the data residing in your MRO/M&E system?

Contact us for more information and to discuss your airline’s situation by clicking in below button or send an email to hello@exsyn.com