Small Fleet in a Box

Over 35% of airlines are operating fleets of less than 25 aircraft. The information systems required to launch an airline are probably more complex than other industrial or travel businesses that support the industry. The time and money required to select, design, install and maintain these systems can easily distract from flying planes and satisfying customers. SkyThread is partnering with leading MRO solution providers to build pre-configured and integrated solutions for small airline operations. Since data is critical to an effort such as this, integration into SkyThread’s global data exchange will accelerate implementation, enhance usage, and deliver superior outcomes in managing line and base maintenance activities.

Aging Aircraft and Orphaned Fleets

As we near the end of the era of mechanical aircraft, we have an abundance of aged aircraft in fleets around the world.  The natural course of events is that these planes are “passed down” through generations of airlines with young airlines often taking possession of older aircraft that may need the most attention. Aging aircraft have challenges related to parts supply chain, parts documentation, experienced technicians, and operational reliability. 

Orphaned fleets can occur anywhere.  When an airline has less than 12 aircraft of a particular platform, it can run into challenges related to “critical mass” around supplier management, parts availability, and technician certification.  When an aircraft in the fleet is grounded, the ability to recover schedule through re-routing other aircraft are more complicated.

Multi-platform / Common Process

Airlines are running multiple versions of MRO solutions and multiple MRO platforms and systems built for specific purposes, such as electronic logbooks. Developing a simple / common data taxonomy that works within and between these systems is highly beneficial to airline operations. Further, integration to the multitude of airframe, Tier 1 and other health monitoring systems creates new challenges related to data, security, and integration. Finally, a number of unique blockchain solutions are being introduced which increase the number of systems within the IT landscape of an airline. SkyThread works with major systems integrators to support the integration of these environments.

Aircraft Predictive Maintenance

A significant amount of money has been invested in predictive maintenance by ecosystem players throughout the aircraft value chain. Not all these efforts have been as successful as planned for many reasons, not the least of which is the complex integration of parts and systems on the aircraft that put out signals read by these analytics solutions.

Dealing with false positives and false negatives is on an ongoing struggle. To that end, our use case will not “add” to the voluminous library of algorithms but provide a reliable picture of the full “part by part” configuration of the plane in the blockchain. This will better inform the analytics engines on what they’re dealing with on each aircraft. This use case will maintain the part inventories of each aircraft tail number in the fleet and build the digital twin for the aircraft.

EDI Integration

Virtually all airlines are connected to tier-1 parts providers, parts brokers, and repair centers using EDI. Back in 2005, Boeing published their EDI Implementation Guide for suppliers covering the key transactions required to purchase and receive a part. SkyThread will support the ecosystem in pulling information “once” for both maintenance of the SkyThread “Planes, Parts, People and Places” ecosystem and to complete the underlying parts and repair transactions.