Always fit to Fly (AHM)

Time is money in any business, but especially in the aviation industry. At an airline, the dollars can add up quickly when a $100-million airplane unexpectedly sits idle, even for a short period of time.

To help airlines reduce flight delays, cancellations, air turn-backs and diversions, The Boeing Company is introducing a new service, Airplane Health Management, or AHM. AHM monitors the health of an airplane in flight and relays that information in real time from the air to the ground. When the airplane arrives at the gate, maintenance crews are ready to make any needed repairs quickly.

"With Airplane Health Management, airlines will be able to identify problems long before an airplane lands," said Lou Mancini, vice president of Maintenance Services in Boeing Commercial Aviation Services. "Airline personnel will have time to review maintenance procedures, assemble necessary parts and be waiting for the airplane when it arrives."
The new service also allows airlines to realize efficiencies in their operations and provide a superior experience for their passengers, Mancini added.Airplane Health Management collects data from the airplane in real-time. The primary source of the data is the airplane central maintenance computer or condition monitoring system. AHM also can collect electronic logbook data from the new Electronic Flight Bag (which Boeing is introducing on the 777-300ER).
AHM continually integrates incoming data from each airplane with basic model design data, in-service experiences reported by airplane operators and industry-wide fleet-performance data for that airplane model.

"The original equipment manufacturer is best-positioned to offer such comprehensive analysis," Mancini said. "We can look across a database wider than that of any specific airline."
If there is a problem with a particular airplane in flight, AHM notifies airline personnel via the Internet or by pager. The notification directs the airline to the Boeing business-to-business Web portal, MyBoeingFleet.com, for flight-specific information that they can use to make informed maintenance decisions.

In addition to diagnosing an airplane problem in flight, AHM also can be used to predict when parts might fail, so that they can be replaced or repaired during a regularly scheduled maintenance check as a preventive measure, rather than at an inconvenient time or place when a part fails unexpectedly.

"Basically, we're providing a single source of information from which airlines can make maintenance decisions and identify trends to support long-term fleet reliability programs," Mancini said. "AHM is both a diagnostic and a prognostic tool."
Another feature of AHM is that it's not limited to just Boeing airplanes. According to Mancini, "We can provide portions of this service for other commercial airplanes, not just our own."