Getting Ahead of the Game: The Surge in Transmittable, Real-time Diagnostics
A Dassault Falcon bizjet is motoring along nicely when a CAS (crew alerting system) warning message pops up. The crew elects to divert. This is going to cost some time. The issue is how much time? A system called FalconBroadcast has already sent an email to the technician on the ground. The report flagged suspect part failures and maintenance had parts moving prior to aircraft touchdown at the alternate airfield. Time-savings were substantial.
Saving time is what business aircraft do for a living. Now, a slew of new transmittable diagnostic messaging systems is putting corporate aircraft operators ahead of the game when it comes to responding to squawks.
No peripheral piece of the maintenance puzzle, FalconBroadcast “is kind of a backbone” for Dassault Falcon Jet’s future maintenance diagnostic efforts according to Geoff Chick, the OEM’s vice president of customer service. The satellite-based system resides on EASy-equipped Falcons – 2000, 900, and 7X series craft fitted with Honeywell’s Primus Epic system.
Although FalconBroadcast works with VHF too, “You really need [to be linked] to a satcom system to take full advantage” of its capabilities — especially in oceanic or remote location operations says Randy Corey, Falcon Jet’s manager of customer service administration and operator advisory board coordinator.
So confident is Falcon Jet in the setup that it’s part of the airplane as delivered. “We let [customers] try it free of charge for nine months,” says Chick. “The renewal rate is 80 percent,” and the system is operational on almost 150 Falcons as of press time.
Textron Aviation’s entry into the real-time market is LinxUs and it’s on the Citation M2, CJ3+, Sovereign, Latitude, and CX+, all aircraft certified within the last three years. LinxUs employs a Garmin GSR56 Iridium satellite receiver to transmit data while in flight and a Garmin GDL59 Wi-Fi unit to do so on the ground.
This new-breed of diagnostic messaging is both fast and flexible.
“Let’s say we’re in a Sovereign+ and are flying at 40,000 feet from New York to Chicago,” says Michael Vercio, Textron Aviation’s vice president for product support. “Half-way through the trip, the pilot gets a CAS message in the cockpit saying he’s got right wing anti-ice failure.
Vercio says, “All the information that occurred from that failure … can automatically be transmitted via Wi-Fi to the internet to a number of locations. He could have emails go directly to his maintenance control system (in the form of an email), and they come to us — the OEM — so we can monitor the issue. It could also go to a centralized location where that customer, or that company, could go in and see the data real-time.”
The point: no one’s left in the dark. Communication of the problem, and how to go about fixing it, is complete and completely transparent. There may be a failure on board, but there’s no failure to communicate.
That email that the technician gets names the fault, indicates the root cause, the flight parameters, and provides a direct link to Textron support.
With FalconBroadcast communication of “the data is cleansed, manipulated, and presented in a very user-friendly and intuitive format from Dassault’s own servers on the ground,” says Chick. “It’s not just raw data coming through. It’s presented in the Dassault Falcon Customer Portal in an extremely easy-to-use report.” If the operator wants to that information is pushed to his smartphone in the form of an email. The report shows up in real-time, with a more comprehensive run down available via Falcon Jet’s Customer Portal.
Embraer Executive Jets' entry is a health management system that senior manager of service and support solutions, Andre Kovacs says reduces operator manpower while boosting productivity. It too is pegged to either satellite or Wi-Fi transmission. In place on the new Legacy 500, and to a lesser degree the Phenom, Kovacs says, “We have already seen gains in terms of getting information from these downloads [so as to] speed up the analysis for troubleshooting.”
Not all that long ago, Embraer had to dispatch a mechanic to the field to troubleshoot. Now, the diagnosis has largely been done ahead of time. The technician’s job when he reaches the diverted aircraft or AOG may well have changed. The mission nowadays could be to install the appropriate part, a part that he probably already has in his possession — courtesy of diagnostic messaging.
Embraer Executive Jets — for a period of time — offers the system free on the Legacy 500. Kovacs says fleet managers’ response to the health management system has been good.
Beyond Diagnostics
Technology has a way of carving out new territory, testing old assumptions. And so it is with business jet diagnostic messaging.
Predictive maintenance isn’t new, especially among commercial carriers. But it’s just beginning to gain traction among bizjet operators. Identifying and replacing components before failure is a never-ending quest, its success dependent “on the system and the equipment,” says Chick. “There are indications from certain systems that by themselves, or when combined with other indications, give you a very clear direction as to something that might be about to fail.”
Falcon Jet’s Corey picks up the conversation: “The modern airplane is predicated a lot on timing.” Take a typical valve. How long does it take to open or close? “The architecture of the fault history database and the EASy cockpit” possess “the potential to flag equipment which is decaying, that’s not 100 percent healthy, such as a valve. Where a valve may move slow, it’s still moving.” He says a diagnostic message that it’s not performing 100 percent, despite the fact the system is airworthy, might spark closer scrutiny.
The upshot says Corey: Now you can manage that component on a more scheduled basis, he says, “as opposed to an AOG or a break on the road.”
The word potential is the key. “We’re still learning,” says Embraer’s Kovacs. “Trend [analysis] is still a bit far at this moment. We need to get more deeply into the mechanical machines, like generators, gearboxes, and things like that … This [trend analysis] is happening more strongly with large-sized commercial aircraft. And we’re trying to learn with them.”
Propjet Diagnostic Messaging
If business jet OEMs are still learning from airlines about the predictive potential of diagnostic messaging, OEMs, such as Textron Aviation are learning from pure jets. Tony Balestracci, the company’s vice president of global customer service, says he “would anticipate eventually” adding LinxUs to the company’s King Air line of propjets.
For now, Daher, builder of the popular TBM line of single-engine propjets, is taking a measured approach to data downloads. The OEM’s TBM 900 has a completely new electrical system, an important component of which is fault-loading capability, says Charles Holomek. He’s Daher’s vice president of customer support for the Americas. Over 80 percent of the planet’s TBMs operate in the Americas, some 500 aircraft.
Data collected from the TBM’s fault-detection system is downloadable on the ground via laptop.
Daher’s approach is to take advantage of ground-downloadable data while focusing on fine-tuning its check intervals says Holomek. “We’ve changed our inspection program to optimize the maintenance intervals. We used to have an inspection program that called for a check every 100 [flight] hours. Then there were more extensive checks at 300 hours and 600 hours. We’ve evolved the inspection program so that now you do a check every 200 hours or 12 months, whichever occurs first.”
How long it takes for real-time diagnostic messaging to reach the ranks of smaller turbine aircraft remains to be seen. But with the pace of technology as fluidly fast as it is, don’t blink.
