Aircraft Digital Records – The Past and The Present

This is the first in a series of four articles based on the content of the 2nd APTN (Aircraft Professionals Technical Network) workshop held at the Gateway Hub in Shannon, Ireland on 29th of November this year.

John Barry, SVP Business Development at Compass Aviation Group, spoke about the evolution of digital records in relation to commercial aircraft and in particular in relation to aircraft leasing and lease transition management.

           “How times have changed over the last 40 years”, said Mr Barry, “Back in the 1970’s, the majority of commercial aircraft were owned by airlines, there were no aircraft transitions, no novations or other such transactions as we see in the aircraft leasing world of today”, added Mr Barry. “In fact, all aircraft records were handled manually, in crates and boxes and were handed from airline to airline and with little technology to record the movement of records, parts or components”

           “If you move forward 25 years to the early noughties, aircraft leasing was in its infancy, but aircraft transitions were becoming more and more commonplace. In fact, at that time approximately 25% of the world commercial fleet were leased aircraft. A typical transition involved two people in a room, a lessor representative and a lessee representative, sifting through boxes of aircraft records and coming up with approximately 200 discrepancies or defects that were solved between these two parties to complete the transition.

Move forward another 20 years and over 45% of the fleet is leased and digitization of aircraft records and internet communications are to the fore. Nowadays you still have two people in a room, but they are supported by expert remote teams on both sides that can raise over 2,500 discrepancies on one aircraft transaction. The timeline to transact aircraft becomes even longer and more complex.”

There has recently been an industry wide initiative to try and solve this problem on the commercial and legal fronts for aircraft novations , namely GATS as promoted by www.agw.aero but the pinch point still remains the systems that are available to manage the technical digital records. 

“There are some very good digital records systems in the market, for example Stream from Aerdata, FlyDocs from Lufthansa Technik, AirVault from GE, Cloudcards from Shannon, Sparta from Acumen and Elevate from Compass and they all have their KSP’s, but what constitutes a good digital records system”, asks Barry. “There are five key elements”, he adds, as shown in Fig (i) below.

Fig (i) Components of Digital Records Management System

Successful digital management systems will integrate and automate these five basic elements making data and decision making more accessible to the clients and hence speeding up the aircraft transition process. Many now incorporate some or all of the following elements and are incorporating Spec 2500 standards as laid down by ATA.

The benefits of true digital records systems will be evident not only in time savings, but in increased productivity, improved communication and an improved bottom line of the users.

 “Implementing a good digital records system is also about transforming the way that that organisations work” adds Barry. He likes to quote from Bellingham’s 2017 publication, “Customers The Day After Tomorrow” where organisations are categorised as having Type 1, Type 2 or Type 3 DNA, where Type 1 are traditional paper-based organisations and Type 3 are fully digital enabled. Barry asks “What is your company’s digital records DNA? How long has your company been around, what is the age profile of the workforce and how do you train them and how can you survive if your records system goes down”.

Finally, John Barry recommends that in selecting any digital records system, management should first use a detailed checklist of requirements, start with the end in mind, set up a proper project governance structure, have a good solution design phase, encourage business transformation and communicate, communicate and communicate and get the end users involved. These are key elements in deciding what system best suits your organisation, he concludes.

You can discover more about the APTN workshops by joining the 'APTN Hub' LinkedIn Group at https://bit.ly/APTN_Hub and by joining APTN at www.aptn.aero/membership