How to use RPA to support aircraft phase out/ re-delivery
Temporarily enhance your airline engineering team with digital co-workers to robotize the aircraft technical records audit as part of your aircraft return deliveries! More and more airlines are faced with the decision to trim down their fleets in response to current market demand. This brings with it, the early return of aircraft to their lessors and/or a fast-tracked phase-out of aircraft and fleets. During each of these 3 occasions, the aircraft technical records audit is critical to provide evidence of aircraft airworthiness compliance. Learn here how Robotic Process Automation can greatly support engineering teams in managing aircraft return deliveries.
Typically, any aircraft return delivery project within an airline could easily see anything between 100K to 200K USD budgeted for aircraft technical records inspections and can easily amount to weeks of work to complete. Under these circumstances returning several aircraft within a short timespan would accumulate to an expensive and resource heavy undertaking with high margins for error and potentials for overshooting return delivery deadlines and accumulating penalty fees for the airline. Under current aviation market conditions additional risks emerge as engineering team are both focussed on restarting operations as well as potential internal reorganizations.
The task
As part of the aircraft redelivery process an aircraft records audit is executed to verify the airworthiness compliance of the aircraft as well as compliance to any potential return delivery conditions. This audit is driven by various aircraft status reports which are cross verified with the actual aircraft technical records to prove compliance towards those same status reports.
This audit task is a highly structured and repetitive tasks and as such lends itself very well to have RPA applied to execute this audit process.
The software robot skills
In order to reduce the overall risk for airlines within this return delivery process, an RPA bot will be highly effective. Part of the RPA learned skills include:
Automatically retrieving the required aircraft airworthiness reports from source MRO software’s
Digital recognition of physical aircraft records such as EASA form one’s, FAA form 8130, Certificate of Compliances, removal / installation labels, workorders, task cards and release statements
Automated verification of airworthiness reports with the digital recognized physical aircraft records
Provide outputs on records completion and gap lists (such as missing certificates for parts installed or missing compliance statements for AD’s)
Benefits
With the aid of this developed RPA skill, the engineers and technical representatives tasked with returning the aircraft could focus on resolving the gaps that were identified by the software robot. Thereby considerably reducing the required manhours and costs for record verification as part of the aircraft return delivery process. Finally, it avoids the need to implement costly aircraft technical records management systems which will only be used for the specific purpose of exiting aircraft out of the fleet.
Do you have any questions?
Feel free to contact us or give us a call on +31 20 8200 7600. We would be happy to help you further. In case you would like to learn more on EXSYN’s capabilities on applying Robotic Process Automation for airline maintenance & engineering, check out our dedicated RPA center.
What is RPA?
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a technology that allows to mimic the actions a human employee would do and does so in the same user interface of the system. And the good news is; running RPA’s can be accomplished within a few weeks without impacting the existing IT infrastructure. It creates a virtual extension of your team in the execution of their daily processes, without the need for increasing head-count, accumulating overtime or the need to re-prioritize focus area’s. Truly creating a digital co-worker. Learn more on: RPA
