How Electronic Technical Logbooks Allow Seamless Pilot-to-Maintain Collaboration

The technical logbooks and electronic logbook of the plane play an essential role in the turnaround of a plane. It’s the primary instrument for interaction between pilots and upkeep organizations. The pilots can examine the aircraft’s upkeep condition and report any faults to the maintenance group, though attempts to digitize this have been unsuccessful thus far.

Kirk Strutt, IFS Aerospace & Defense Product Manager, talks about how the next generation of electronic technical logbooks can attain a sense of balance between pilot engagement, maintenance readiness, and plane safety.

Accenture Principal Director Craig Gottlieb

The latest research shows aerospace and defense businesses are growing over fifty-five % of the electronic proofs of concept to production. Nevertheless, less than twenty % of them do this successfully to produce lasting gain to their business. One particular advancement might appear to be electronic logbooks for the technical upkeep of aircraft.

The most crucial advantage of an electric technical logbook is to reduce silos of information between the day-to-day operations staff, allowing all stakeholders to work in concert to make sure the plane is serviceable and on time with passengers.

This extremely paper-intensive practice of digitizing technical logbooks for planes appears the apparent goal. Still, attempts to do this have been thwarted primarily because of the complexity of the treatments brought forward. The result is a meager adoption rate among commercial airlines of genuine electronic logbooks.

Let us check out the reasons this has been the situation.

Historically, Electronic technical Logbooks Provided Complexity for Airlines. The problem with a paper Technical logbook is that all of the info it holds rests outside the airline’s primary maintenance process, no matter the software provider. These highly developed core maintenance methods are highly granular and thorough since they view every facet of plane maintenance down to the last bolt.

The logbook, however, exists merely as a means of interacting between the maintenance business as well as the pilot to lessen turnaround times. It works basically as a micro maintenance process, with the capability to sign off work, monitor postponed items, and evaluate the history of repairs and maintenance completed on the plane. Hence, enhancing and optimizing aircraft turnaround times is crucial.

In a paper-based scenario, the pilot must hold off till they arrive on the aircraft before seeing what deferrals are related to a flight. The pilot might have been given a flight dispatch in a pre-flight briefing, but this might not reflect the current condition of a plane, usually which means they would not contain an up-to-date perspective of whatever last second that had taken place on the incoming voyage.

Initial efforts to digitize this method saw electronic technical logbooks incorporated into the plane itself

which proved a complex and costly catastrophe since it required introducing flight-proven hardware and software systems, not a viable solution.

After that, with the introduction of iPads and other tablets to the flight deck, the potential for keeping maintenance information on a portable mobile device, things moved ahead. The major stumbling block was that these paperless methods mirrored the paper-based processes they were attempting to change. Not making specialized electronic logbooks a completely integrated system is merely logging tasks by hand into an iPad instead of pen to paper.

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