How does Aircraft Data Management contribute to the overall Safety of Aviation?
In today’s digital economy, data can be seen as the new currency. It can be used to make more informed decisions, optimize operations, and reduce costs to increase revenue or profits altogether! Before we dive into the relationship between aircraft data management and airworthiness let’s first define what data management actually is.
What Is Aircraft Data Management?
Data management is the process of handling data so that it can be used effectively. This involves storing, organizing, and accessing data and ensuring its quality and security. Data management is a critical part of any business or organization, as it helps to ensure that data is properly utilized. Without data management, data would quickly become unorganized and chaotic, making it difficult to find and use. Data management practices help to keep data organized and accessible so that it can be used effectively.
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, and weather conditions to engine performance and logbooks.
Aircraft data management and airworthiness
Airworthiness refers to the state in which an aircraft is fit for safe operation, and effective aircraft data management is essential for maintaining and monitoring airworthiness. With the increasing amount of data generated by aircraft, the importance of aircraft data management is only set to increase, making it essential for aviation's overall safety and reliability. So how does aircraft data management contribute to the overall safety of aviation?
Improved Maintenance Planning
Effective aircraft data management allows airlines to keep track of all maintenance activities, ensuring that they are performed on time and according to the required standards. With access to accurate data on an aircraft’s maintenance history airlines can plan maintenance activities more effectively, reducing the risk of costly downtime. Plus, it helps to enhance customer satisfaction by reducing flight delays and cancellations. By using data to identify and proactively address potential maintenance issues, airlines can minimize the impact of maintenance activities on flight schedules, reducing the likelihood of delays and cancellations.
Reduce System Failures
Airlines can use aircraft data to monitor the performance of critical systems in real-time reducing the risk of system failures and ensuring the continued airworthiness of the aircraft.
Cost Savings
It can help airlines reduce costs by optimizing maintenance activities and reducing downtime. Airlines can use data to analyze maintenance activities, spare parts, and downtime, identifying areas where costs can be reduced. By reducing downtime, airlines can also reduce the cost of lost revenue due to flight cancellations or delays.
Compliance with Regulations
Aircraft data management is essential for ensuring compliance with aviation regulations. Airlines must keep track of all maintenance activities and ensure they are performed according to the required standards. By having accurate and up-to-date data on an aircraft's maintenance history, airlines can ensure that they comply with regulations and maintain the airworthiness of the aircraft.
Improved Decision Making
It provides airlines with access to accurate and up-to-date information, which can be used to make informed decisions. For example, airlines can use data to analyze the cost of different maintenance activities, compare the performance of different aircraft systems, and assess the impact of different maintenance strategies.
By implementing a centralized data management system, airlines can ensure that all data is accurate, consistent, and easily accessible. This can help airlines reduce the risk of data errors and improve the efficiency of their data management processes.
How to get started?
Above we could read why aircraft data management is crucial for airworthiness management, now we need to get started with it. To really profit from all the data generated by your aircraft and organization you should follow the three steps below:
Collect and Validate
Manage and Keep Trust
Empower and Drive Value
Step 1: Collect & Validate:
In the world of data management, airlines store data in multiple systems. Collecting and identifying the data itself and having it stored in different systems doesn’t provide any value—an airline needs to process it and have only one single source of truth. 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, centralize and validate it.
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, to validate all the data, and to have a data standard to be able to drive value.
Step 2: Manage & Keep Trust
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 a 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, 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 pretty challenging to keep an 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 from spiralling out of control to keep trust and confidence in the aircraft data, at all times.
Step 3: Empower & Drive Value
The ultimate step is to drive value from data. Making a pie chart in excel is not difficult but managing a data warehouse, presenting information in a logical cognitive matter, and making use of new data technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) or machine learning (ML) is a field of its own.
This means an airline needs the right people or partners that have the skills and knowledge to create this value.
To enable these three steps you need to
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 only keeping and organizing 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:
Do 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?
