By James Blackman
German airline services company Lufthansa Technik has introduced new condition monitoring tools for Airbus and Boeing operators, available with its AVIATAR digital platform. The new releases have come out of a year-long joint-project with United Airlines to combine their engineering know-how and data science teams to develop predictive maintenance solutions for Boeing 737 and Airbus A319/A320 aircraft.
The new apps allow United Airlines and other operators to manage technical operations for Airbus and Boeing aircraft on a single screen in the AVIATAR platform. They also bring a range of predictive maintenance cases developed for the new-gen (NG) Boeing 737 NG to help operators avoid unplanned maintenance and grounded fleets (AOGs). Lufthansa Technik is offering integration on the platform with United’s maintenance and engineering (M&E) system logbook, also embedding OEM documentation linking features for the new 737 NG.
AVIATAR, launched in 2017, is Lufthansa Technik’s platform for digital products and services. It offers various automated fulfilment solutions, plus operational IoT-based tools for such cases as predictive maintenance. The German outfit said it combines fleet management, data science, and engineering expertise for airlines, maintenance and repair (MRO) companies, equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and aircraft lessors. The system integrates with supply-chain fulfilment and customer IT systems.
The new condition monitoring function provides an overview of an aircraft’s condition, and flags potential technical faults and makes proactive maintenance recommendations. It combines this health data also with data about the status and flight schedule of fleets of aircraft, combining also with work orders and positional data. It offers customisable alerts and notifications at aircraft level, system (ATA chapter) level, or fleet level. “The user gains an excellent overview of potential corrective actions for respective maintenance and repair operations,” the two companies said in a statement.
Vice president of technical operations planning and strategy at United Airlines, Kurt Carpenter said: “Our goal… was to focus on operationalizing new predictive maintenance alerts and data to provide decision support and prescriptive maintenance outputs to frontline teams. [The two companies] worked to consolidate condition monitoring and predictive maintenance alerting for 737 NG and A319/A320 fleets into a single platform in just one year. Our digital technology teams also collaborated to integrate our maintenance logbook, in-house predictive alerting, and technical manual workflows. We look forward to… co-developing new and unique predictive maintenance models.”
Head of corporate sales for the Americas at Lufthansa Technik, Georgios Ouzounidis said: “United is the first airline in the Americas to use the… Boeing and Airbu… troubleshooting, with a fleet of over 500 aircraft on the AVIATAR platform. Our [team]… customised the interface to United’s maintenance software, adding a new interface into our open system landscape. [This]… transatlantic cooperation… during the pandemic… is an excellent blueprint for partnership projects in digitalization, tech-ops, and MRO.”
