The Digital Saviour of Aviation’s Rising MRO Costs
We begin our tale with an all too familiar scenario in the Aviation industry…
An aircraft is out of service due to an unplanned, unscheduled incident. This incident could be projected to take 8 hours; this incident may also end up taking days. Either way, every second that is lost due to unscheduled maintenance is costly. Why? Because not only is money spent on aircraft parts, machinery, and the man hours needed to fix the fault, but that cost also extends out to flight crew overtime, allowance and rescheduling; passenger care services, such as meals, communication, accommodation, and compensation; airport charges, like landing fees and cargo handling; extra fuel consumption… The list can go on. And the list does go on. For a medium-size aircraft, at one of the larger Aviation organisations, the average cost of a single operational interruption has been averaged at $28,300. And this is only for a single interruption.
Right now, the global MRO spend for airlines is enormous. According to IATA’s 2017 Airline Maintenance Cost Executive Commentary, the MRO spend in 2016 was roughly $67.6B, not including overhead. But the far more dire statistic is that there is a 5.1% increase in operational costs per annum. Which means that, by 2026, the market size will reach $100.6B.
There are two significant reasons why this cost is climbing as the years go by. The first, is that the Aviation MRO sector is facing an ageing workforce, with many of their most skilled workers set to retire in the coming years. This, coupled with the lack of adequate support for training institutions, means that the staff capable of handling failures in a timely and effective manner is going to decrease. MRO staffing in Aviation is reaching a critical point.
The second prevailing factor is the lack of technology currently being utilised to meet the needs of the Aviation industry. There is an enormous amount of information that exists within any organisation. For Aviation in particular, timely access to information influences the overall airworthiness of an aircraft. As an example, roughly 500GB of data is collected from a 787 flight. This is a significant amount of information that needs to be stored, logged, and often responded to by technicians when the flight lands. There are currently no adequate systems in place within the aviation industry to make this data readily available at critical moments, at the point of a fault.
What we should be asking ourselves is, in times like these, when Airlines are facing increasing costs, decreasing support, and are reaching a critical point in MRO — how can the ever-evolving digital revolution provide relief?
Enter Artificial Intelligence.
If you haven’t yet had heard these words uttered by someone around you, either from the feeds of every Tech news site or the tip of Elon Musk’s tongue, then you’re about to go on an AI journey.
But first, we must journey through a Platform that we believe will fundamentally change the future of Aviation MRO. LexX Technologies have created a Platform called ‘LexX’, which leverages the latest in AI and Machine Learning Technologies to bring an Intelligent Assistant to MRO. The way that it works is: LexX collects an organisation’s assets (technical publications, work orders, logs, defect history, etc) and turns this into prompt fault isolation via Natural Language Processing. LexX can read not only digital documents, but can turn handwritten documents into readily accessible digital versions as well. And this is only the beginning.
Currently, there is a lot of research into, and trialling of, predictive maintenance, which is designed to analyse equipment condition in order to predict when a fault might occur. However, this technology only scratches the surface of what is possible in our digital age. And this is where our journey takes us back to AI. Our LexX platform is not simply a search and find system; the platform itself is intelligent. LexX has the capability to learn from an organisation’s assets, equipment behaviour, and human user behaviour. This means that the more the system is used, the more it learns, and the more it learns, the more reliable it becomes with each new request. And it’s capabilities don’t stop there. We are currently working on new possibilities for interfaces in addition to Natural Language Text, such as voice, noise, sensors, and brain waves. The equivalent of having this level of intelligence and accuracy would be constantly having the most senior, knowledgeable staff member, with years of experience, by your side, every second of every day. Our platform empowers engineers by bringing knowledge right to their fingertips. For any Star Wars fans out there, it’s basically like having R2D2 as your own personal MRO assistant.
At this point, Reader, there is probably little doubt left that AI is indeed the way, not only of the future, but of the future for Aviation MRO. This is where our passion comes from here at LexX Technologies. We’re not only excited that we are part of this ever-changing tech ecology, but that we can bring this passion to impact people’s real world experience.
If you’d like to know more about LexX Technologies, request a demo, or get in contact with us, head to www.lexxtechnologies.com
And so, it seems only fitting to close our tale with the wise words of C3PO, to remind us all to be humble in times of such extraordinary possibilities, “I do believe they think I am some kind of god…it’s against my programming to impersonate a deity”. Singularity, here we come.
