Abu Dhabi's Etihad Airways has become the first customer of US-based predictive maintenance specialist Taleris.

The UAE carrier signed an agreement with the Dallas-based joint venture between General Electric and technology services provider Accenture to monitor and analyse maintenance data of selected aircraft systems in order to predict equipment failures and tailor MRO processes accordingly.

The deal follows a trial phase in 2012 and will initially be limited to auxiliary power units (APUs), bleed air and air conditioning systems across the airline's Airbus and Boeing fleets. The focus on air-based systems is due to Etihad's desert operating environment, where dust and sand typically leads to greater wear and tear than in other regions. But the equipment scope will be expanded in future, says Bernhard Randerath, Etihad's vice-president for engineering.

Taleris collects maintenance data from the respective systems, which the aircraft continuously transmits to the ground. The information is automatically analysed to determine performance trends of the equipment. Randerath says that the software 'learns' increasingly refined analytics with growing data accumulation. This has allowed it to predict, for example, the failure of certain valves down to a week.

The respective parts can be replaced in time before failure and thus increase operational reliability. Randerath says the goal is to move away from regular maintenance checks - where aircraft systems are inspected on a preventive basis - to more targeted MRO events where only the necessary components are being replaced.

This should not only create savings through more efficient maintenance operations, but also avoid storage of unnecessary spare parts.

Data corruption is a problem, however. Randerath concedes that "no fault found" (NFF) events - where the aircraft's health monitoring system indicates a malfunction in a component, which can then not be determined by a technician - creates spikes in the performance data, which in turn compromises the trend analyses.

But Randerath says that Taleris' system automatically extracts such data "noise" and analyses the events separately to determine whether the respective event is a NFF.

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Source: Flight Daily News

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