Together with the UK Ministry Of Defence and our SME partners, we’ve shown that a new approach is not only possible, but could be made generic across the fleet of different aircraft. Our trial has been proven successful, so the next step would be to put it into general use.Andrew, Principal Engineer for Future Technology
Andrew worked with several SMEs to create the system, which included a smartphone app for maintenance engineers that combined data from maintenance and flight history. The app flagged data on high G-force events, instructing them to inspect the airframe straight after the flight, rather than waiting weeks for that data to come back.
To make the app even more intuitive, the team included a natural language processing ‘chatbot’ interface, so they could ask simple questions like “Show me all the propeller maintenance carried out in the last six months” and get an immediate answer, rather than trawling through lots of records to find it.
The architecture developed on the project has been built to be compatible with any cloud infrastructure that meets the appropriate security credentials, as well as the emerging MOD Combat Cloud, so will be forward compatible with whatever provider is chosen. The app ensures that raw data can be hidden from end-users, even though it allows analysis to be performed.
Another benefit of our generic approach was that when we were asked to create the same secure open architecture for Typhoon data, it was straightforward for all the third party “apps” to automatically work with the new data. Andrew, Principal Engineer for Future Technology, led the project. He explained: “Together with the UK Ministry of Defence and our SME partners, we’ve shown that a new approach is not only possible, but could be made generic across the fleet of different aircraft. Our trial has been proven successful, so the next step would be to put it into general use.”