Optimising Predictive Maintenance Management for Airlines

As the chief operating officer, what are the different kinds of trends or challenges that you see in the aviation space today?

There are two main challenges in the aviation industry, the COVID 19 crisis and the environmental challenges which existed before the pandemic. Even with the challenges, however, we have to operate and run the business on a daily basis, and also think about the way to improve operations and modernize fleets, which we have been doing during the pandemic. Currently, we fly nine aircrafts, five Neos, and five ASP 30 Classic. However, we have started the second phase of fleet renewal where we will replace four additional Neos to get a full new fleet by October 2024. This fleet renewal initiative is a way to respond to the environmental challenges because we have been working on improving operational procedures with green procedures, spending at least 15 years in the process. Since we had started early, Airbus introduced those procedures in the official manuals. The better way to respond to the environmental challenge is to replace the aircraft with new technology to achieve a huge amount of fuel economy, with about 25 percent improvement in fuel consumption. This could also result in emissions having better yields compared to the previous generation of aircrafts and lesser noise pollution. This kind of project is not easy as financing new technologies brings about a lot of disruptive change to the industry when it is suffering from an economical point of view.

What are some of the new trends that you see in the industry today?

The development of Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) has seen a pragmatic improvement in the way we operate our fleet. We have been introduced to the usage of predictive maintenance so that we can predict and repair any failure before it happens. The introduction of Skywise, a platform developed by Airbus and Palantir, has helped us collect data and estimate how the operations are going to work. The data treatment is also a strong contribution to the environmental impact as the more we optimize the way we operate our aircraft, the less we consume fuel and the lower we emit harmful substances in the environment. Our dedicated team analyses all the data and uses it for decision-making. One more thing we use to tackle the environmental challenge is the introduction of sustainable aviation fuels, and we aim to improve their usage more than traditional ones. However, sustainable aviation fuels are 4-5 times more expensive than traditional fuels so we should introduce more and more aviation fuels in a way that is sustainable for airlines.

When you are managing the fleet, how do you optimize the predictive maintenance and big data processes?

We operate long haul operations so it is significant to keep the aircraft in flight for as long as possible. From a technical point of view, we aim to bring our maintenance performance from 99 percent to 100 percent, which was tough when we were in the classic technique of reactive maintenance. With the help of predictive maintenance, we can see the exact time of failure and the part which is going to fail, and that is key to help in achieving an extremely high level of dispatch reliability. When we finance aviation technology like the airport certified employee (ACE) research, we push the aircraft utilization to more than 5000 hours per year per aircraft, which is a necessary step to solve the economical equation. We also try to reach the profitability and sustainability standards for the airline at the end of the day.

Do you have any advice to any leader trying to go through a similar kind of transformation in their own company and improve their processes?

The aviation industry is an industry where safety is the first priority so any change introduced must be proven to be safe and compliant with regulations. Companies should fix pragmatic objectives in a way that the new change or technology is adopted by any internal or external customers. Since we are dealing with managing change, the resources and human capital of the company is very important and a new organization that is evolving should not take the traditional approach. Companies also need to have people with a lot of cross skills, who are eager to evolve in terms of the skills and proficiencies that they have. It is also important to have people with an open mind do they look forward to and anticipate new challenges in the company, and everyone needs to be innovative and take full responsibility for their contribution.