“We are getting to the point where most of the value of an aircraft is in the data associated with that aircraft.”
Yes, that’s a quotation. I haven’t attributed it to any one person, because in my travels and dealings with various players in aerospace, it’s a comment that I’ve heard repeatedly, from several people, all from different companies.
That same sentiment echoed loudly throughout the Arizona desert this week at the ATA e-Business Forum (the deserts in Phoenix are surrounded by mountains, so I’m pretty sure that was an echo I heard but coming many from different voices).
It started with the keynote address, which was delivered by Ray Valeika, former SVP of TechOps for Delta. Ray’s overall theme was maintenance, but he started with a comparison of how things used to be — airlines owning their own planes and regarding maintenance as a core competency performed by an exclusive “club”, with how things are today — 40% of planes in the air are leased and maintenance often done under contract with a vendor.
The net result is that planes change hands often. Airlines turn them over to their MROs (temporarily) for regular overhauls. Leases expire. Planes get sold. And whenever planes change hands, they need to be accompanied by mountains of data.
Ray’s vision for the future? Planes need to get smarter. Today, planes can tell their pilots lots of things – where they are in the world, the wind speed they are flying in, their current angle of inclination. But those same planes have nothing to say to their maintenance crews. They can’t tell the maintenance people how many hours or miles they’ve flown, when the landing gear needs to be overhauled, or who their current owner is. And that needs to change.
Ray delivered a really brilliant keynote address. It was one of those keynotes that truly set the stage for the days ahead and one you kept hearing about for the rest of the conference. In almost every session I attended, at some point the presenter would say “as we heard from Ray in the keynote…”, and then go on to talk about the value of good data, and having access to that data. I saw some of his quotes on monitors in trade show booths on the show floor. People were talking about it at lunch.
I even did it in my own presentation. And not only did I tie in some of my remarks to the keynote topic; my entire presentation was about fulfilling Ray’s vision of the future. My presentation was about the changes going into the RFID on Parts standard that we’ve been working on for a couple years in the working group. I explained that the reasons behind those changes are that companies have started to roll out their tagging programs, and now that they’re using the technology, they see the value of storing even more data on high memory tags. Aircraft hours (and cycles) are one of the data items we’ve been asked to include, along with hours and cycles for individual components. In the working group we’ve come up with a nice way for companies to add industry standard data (items defined in the ATA Common Support Data Dictionary) and even a way to add company-proprietary data items.
This is frankly the perfect way to capture all this data, and make it accessible. One of Ray’s final comments was this: “Planes should come with their own medical records.” That’s where it all comes together — the Spec 2000 RFID on Parts team working to put Birth Records and Part History Records directly on flyable assets, and the keynote address setting the stage for the aircraft to be a self-contained patient record. Makes perfect sense – after all, most of the value of an aircraft is tied up in it’s data, so why not keep them together. And Smart Assets built from high-memory RF tags is clearly the right approach for aerospace. You can see that bright people in the business agree with this since one of Ray’s first comments is the one I’ll end with:
“RFID is here to stay.” (I think I hear an echo.)
