Aircraft Maintenance Technology

MAY 2014

The aircraft maintenance professional's source for technological advancements, maintenance alerts, news, articles, events, and careers

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course, "we can't. Customers need to have a say in the non-routine things we find." Typically, that means an operator rep- resentative on-site. That costs money. Virtual approval, repair approval from afar, "makes the process a lot smoother." Take a photograph of the proposed fix, send it to the customer on the Internet, and nobody need break stride. As for customer pushback, Kilgour is surprised there hasn't been any. "You'd have thought it would meet some resistance … But every customer we've introduced it to has loved it." Access is ascendant, both for the customer and the technician alike. Republic A ir ways Holdings is roll- ing out wireless computer carts in its maintenance bases across the country according to Scott Thien, the company's manager of corporate communications. Republic is phasing in 10 of the carts at its Indianapolis hangar, rendering main- tenance "much more efficient," accord- ing to IND maintenance manager Tim Simpson. "We can look up the manual references and order repair parts needed without walking too far away [from the airplane] and getting distracted from the job in progress." Again, it's a matter of not having to break stride, physically or mentally. If what's happening in Indy is an example of maintenance on the micro scale, Embraer's emerging Scheduled Structural Health Monitoring (S-SHM) solution is decidedly macro in scope. In a written statement, the airframer contends S-SHM has the potential to "dramatically" reduce downtime and direct maintenance costs associated with complex, time-consuming struc- tural inspections. Embraer says the sys- tem is being tested in collaboration with some carriers under real operational conditions. Here's the essence of it: "tra- ditional inspections would be replaced or enhanced " by the installation of sensor networks on the structures you want to monitor. During normal aircraft operation, the system is unpowered, activated only during maintenance checks. Embraer believes the net result of S-SHM is "conventional tasks that currently require several [man-hours] would be performed in minutes if no structural damage is detected." Up at Hyannis, on the coast of New England, at Cape A ir & Nantucket Airlines, the aircraft of choice is the ven- erable Cessna 402C. The company has 72 of them, the largest f leet of the pis- ton-powered type on the planet. With no replacement on the visible horizon, Jeffrey Schafer, the director of MRO and f leet programs, wants to sustain those airplanes for "the next 10 to 12 years." The 402C operator can afford to focus all its energies on maintaining its own airplanes. "We don't take in outside maintenance," says Trish Lorino, Cape Air & Nantucket Airlines' vice president of marketing and public relations. The operator has its hands full "maintain- ing an aging f leet of aircraft which has been out of production [since 1985] and operated at a high rate of utilization in challenging environments." Schafer's goal is conceptually simple, and continuingly challenging. "We want to control our own destiny with the airframe," he says. With the exception Discovery Air Technical Services in Montreal is heavily into Dash-8s but has also started to do maintenance on the Bombardier Q4000. DISCOVERY AIR TECHNICAL SERVICES AviationPros.com/company/10134757 AMT_16-20_CS CommMRO.indd 19 4/21/14 10:12 AM

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