A year after Flightdocs (Booth C4024) unveiled its HMX electronic maintenance management system for the rotorcraft industry, the company has seen a steady uptake from operators and is continuing to roll out enhanced capabilities. The web-based platform replaces paper maintenance and inventory recordkeeping, and enables operators to track all maintenance, compliance, and forecasting, along with parts and inventory levels, in a single place.
New to the program this year is a customizable capability that allows operators to create checklists for preflight, post-flight, and other events. Since the program is cloud-based, multiple users can have access to the checklist.
The checklist is part of the ongoing expansion capabilities that FlightDocs has released over the past year. One of the bigger releases for HMX is the mobile “Pilot Dash” application, which enables pilots to access critical maintenance data in real-time. This includes both non-scheduled and scheduled maintenance. Flightdocs next is looking at releases aimed at the inventory management and the reporting requirements behind it.
HMX is now in place with some 200 air medical, law enforcement, firefighting, charter, and corporate operators, said Flightdocs COO Greg Heine. The company has had “a lot of success launching it at last year's a Heli-Expo,” he added.
Flightdocs has found particular success in the air medical niche, where the operators operate from multiple bases and had disparate systems. “A lot of the operations were using legacy in-house platforms. Many were still using spreadsheets for maintenance, compliance and inventory tracking,” Heine said, adding that it “becomes a real hassle to manage it on spreadsheets with disconnected systems.”
This provided an opportunity for FlightDocs to build on its enterprise platform with a product designed for rotorcraft markets. Few products are tailored to the unique requirements of maintenance tracking for helicopter operations, he noted. “Hours and cycles track differently. When items come due for a scheduled maintenance, it can be quite different than fixed wing. So trying to take a helicopter and put it into a mold that's really tailored toward [fixed-wing]…doesn't really work,” he explained.
And the response, he said, has been more than the company expected, with operators of all sizes incorporating HMX. “It's been a pretty big hit and we have continued to expand our customer into 2018.”