Roundtable: Maintenance’s Next Horizons with Data, SMS

The maintenance sector is rapidly evolving as data adoption becomes much more prevalent and new requirements are looming in some regions for safety management systems. AIN brought together thought leaders in the industry to share insights on how data and safety tie together and how it is reshaping the sector. Here are highlights from that discussion. Duncan Aviation sponsored this roundtable.

The Participants

Kasey Harwick—executive vice president and COO of Duncan Aviation in Lincoln

Harwick is a 26-year veteran at Duncan Aviation, joining the Lincoln, Nebraska location in 1999 initially in completions on green Astra SPX aircraft. He has since moved into positions of increasing responsibility from lead technician to program manager, director of maintenance, and v-p of aircraft services and quality, among others. Duncan Aviation is one of the largest business aviation MROs in the U.S., with locations in Provo, Utah, and Battle Creek, Michigan, in addition to Lincoln. Alongside them are more than 30 satellite locations and rapid response teams.

Greg Heine—executive vice president of maintenance software for JSSI

Heine joined business aviation maintenance support and financial services provider Jet Support Services, Inc. (JSSI) in 2023 to spearhead the company’s growing maintenance management, MRO, and inventory management software portfolio. He brought 15 years of aviation and software experience with him, previously as president of Flightdocs and before that, chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer for ATP (now Veryon). JSSI supports more than 6,000 aircraft through its maintenance and software programs, as well as offers parts and leasing, aircraft operating data, and advisory services.

R. David (RD) Johnson—vice president of safety for Jet Linx

Johnson joined Jet Linx in 2021 after serving as director of safety management systems for Global Flight Test and Delivery Group. He brought extensive experience in flight and technical operations across the military, commercial, and general aviation sectors, including with American Airlines and the U.S. Air Force in active duty and the Reserves. Jet Linx offers aircraft management, joint ownership, and jet card membership services with more than 20 locations nationwide.

Bill Molloy—vice president of aftermarket sales for Bombardier

Molloy stepped into his current position with Bombardier in November 2023 after serving as COO for engine MRO TES and, before that, as COO with Killick Aerospace Group. He has nearly 35 years of aviation experience spanning regional, commercial, and business aviation. In addition to offering a portfolio of super-midsize and large-cabin business jets, Bombardier has built an extensive customer support network with company-owned service centers, line stations, mobile repair teams, parts depots, and authorized service centers worldwide.

The Discussion

On How the Maintenance Sector Is Changing

Kasey Harwick: It is an interesting time in aviation. We always talk about supply chain; we talk about workforce development. But when you think about the aviation industry, sustainability is the top of everybody’s mind.

Green technologies are coming online. We’re seeing electrical hybrid aircraft, which are going to be new for everybody. FBOs have been built around with conventional fuels, but now they’re building up power stations to support these hybrid aircraft. I think that changes who we are and how we operate as AMTs [aviation maintenance technicians]. Traditionally, you go through the airframe powerplant track, maybe an avionics track, but between connectivity and CMS upgrades and eVTOLs coming out, there are going to be more dynamic technicians as we see it unfold.

On top of that, cybersecurity and compliance are starting to ramp up quite a bit, with the healthy push from EASA. They’re focusing on aircraft systems, maintenance software, and digital records. Digitalization of records is a growing trend. We’re starting to see that the exchange of papers is no longer or even taking a physical hard copy. Digitizing it is truly creating data that’s being shared across multiple operators and organizations.

Greg Heine  

JSSI touches thousands of maintenance events every year. Then on the Traxxall side, where we provide maintenance tracking software to operators, we’re working with thousands of different operators and are their technology partner when it comes to maintenance. To build on what Kasey was saying, we’re seeing data being more important than it ever was before. Back when I started…even in 2009, I think aviation was still behind a lot of other industries in how much paper we were using. Maintenance was being done, it was being recorded, and a lot of this information wasn’t being leveraged to the benefit of the maintenance providers or the operators.

Today, we’re seeing that they’re really trying to tap into this information to get better info on reliability. When we go in for scheduled maintenance, we’re pretty sure that there’s going to be unscheduled maintenance findings that come out of that. There’s a lot of focus on leveraging new technology to tap into data to reduce the amount of downtime for aircraft, so as we plan for the future, we can do a better job at planning for those future maintenance events.

RD Johnson  

Greg said some things that are near and dear to my heart: How long is the airplane going to be out of service? The better we can be predictive versus reactive, the more we will have the metrics we need. By doing so, we can look to the future and say: How do we want to address those issues? We’re looking to put that aircraft back in service as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible.

In the future, we’re going to have to look at how are we doing this with the green; how efficient are we being, and what are we doing to retrofit some items so that we’re not hurting the world.

Bill Molloy

It’s pretty impressive that over the last kind of maybe five to seven years, we’ve seen a lot more tech guys getting into our industry, buying aircraft. They have a different mindset with data; technology is something that’s second nature to them.

I say internally that data is extremely important. But Bombardier doesn’t want to lose sight of the fact that it is a people business. Business aviation is all about the people. It’s all about making sure that the experience is what it needs to be and that our customers want to come back.

Looking at maintenance, the big challenge we all have is getting technicians. We’re spending as much time on technician retention as we are on recruitment, which is very different. We’re all having to step up to the mark and provide a much better environment for these technicians to come into. The training side is very big for us right now. We’re building what we call an incubator, which will be housed in our Wichita facility. Every technician that we bring on into the organization will go through that incubator and be trained on the Bombardier way. That’s something that we feel very excited about.

On the data side of things, I just reviewed the numbers. We’ve got nearly 400 aircraft that are in our network today, whether it’s scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. You can just imagine the amount of data that you can collect on 400 aircraft today. It’s powerful, and I think we all see that. We’re all spending a lot of time and putting a lot of effort into understanding that data and making it work for ourselves and for our customers.

On How Collection of Data Is Changing Maintenance and Improving Efficiency

Bill Molloy

It was probably back in 2017 when we made a statement that we wanted to put a [Smart Link Plus] health monitoring box on every aircraft. The aircraft that we are delivering from the factory have the box pre-installed. Then, we retrofit the existing fleet. Data has always been part of our business or part of our industry. If you look at engine health monitoring, that’s been out there for well over 30 years. But what’s changed is the scope and availability of the data through these health monitoring boxes.

We believe the future of the industry is locked down in [data such as from] our Smart Link Plus box. To offer real-time data while the aircraft is flying is extremely powerful. To be able to analyze the data coming from the aircraft and manage that data is something that gives us a step ahead.

Ultimately, this is all leading to some time in the future where you have preventative maintenance that you can use from data. It can be part of how you manage the fleet of aircraft on a day-to-day basis. We’re not there yet, but we’re making strides. The more and more boxes that we get on aircraft, the more information that we’re getting, and the more customers are starting to understand the power of having this data available.

When we look at our aircraft that are on the market, we’re starting to see there’s a differential with an aircraft with the records, a box already installed, and a history that you can provide. That gives the buyer much more confidence than if you don’t have that information or there’s no box installed. Buyers will certainly pay for that.

Greg Heine  

We’re leveraging a lot of technology internally at JSSI, which ultimately helps our customers. We’re taking data from all different inputs and looking at ways to structure that, create uniformity across it, and that helps us in projecting out maintenance—figuring out when we need to start planning maintenance, who has capacity, and who is available to execute this.

Operators are also getting data inputs from all different sources, whether it’s the aircraft itself or from multiple different systems. That’s an area in the last couple of years that has really advanced.

We’re seeing more and more systems talking to each other. As you look at a flight operation, there are often silos between maintenance, inventory, finance, accounting, and flight operations. These are all different systems with different sets of data. In the past, these systems didn’t talk to each other. There was either no movement of data between them or manual movement of that data, which is messy and time-consuming.

Operators were sitting on a lot of this data without the opportunity to look at it in a holistic way and take action on it. One of the things that we’ve done through Traxxall is to be integration-friendly. We integrate with a lot of different flight operations software providers. We’re looking at new types of providers, like SMS providers, to do integrations with to make this whole process seamless.

One of the other areas that we see struggles with is that there are so many systems within a maintenance operation or a flight operation that we find that users can get fatigued with “I got to go here for that, I got to log into that.” The whole process is becoming a bit cumbersome. It’s probably better than it was in the past when all this stuff was on paper checklists and tech logs. But still, we’re just trying to create this seamless environment where data can be passed back and forth to the right places.

Kasey Harwick 

First off, what Bombardier is doing is pretty impressive. When you think about real-time monitoring of aircraft, that's where we get into that condition-based monitoring, where we're looking at the component level, determining whether it is time for this part to be changed versus waiting for it to break on the aircraft. It's looking more at scheduling and what is necessary.

Our goal as an MRO is to make sure aircraft continue to fly. For us, that's really where that data comes in. We've had electronic work orders for over 17, 18 years. Up to about five years ago, we've used it for simple purposes, but we realized that every day we're generating gigabytes of data, and we should be crawling through that data to better understand forecasting, to better understand our performance, and to better understand routine squawks.

With data today, we have aircraft come in for a scheduled maintenance check, and we have each task code lined out there where we can identify every time we do this one inspection, where are the squawks that are getting yielded and where we need to be able to react.

We developed an AI team a couple of years ago, where we wanted to look at when we see an aircraft, is it the first time we're seeing them? What region does it operate in? How does it operate? How old is the aircraft? We take all these factors in to try to come out with the best schedule to make sure that we are allotting the appropriate downtime.  That way, RD and his team can schedule [Jet Linx’s] ops with confidence that we will hit that target out date.  

RD Johnson

That's one of the things we track almost daily—what's our availability of our aircraft, and are they on time for delivery when they’re coming from the MRO? To piggyback on aircraft monitoring, it’s very important not only to see when a part needs to be replaced and ones that are failing, but also how efficient is that engine and how much fuel am I using. I’m not only just looking at it from the mechanical side of the house, but did I fly it properly, did I fly it efficiently, or was it the airplane or was it me?

That's so important because that's a big cost for our company, the number of flights we have per day. AI can provide that predictability. If Greg can tell me that we need to change the pressure controller because we're monitoring the airplane and at 562 hours it needs to be changed, then I go to Kasey, then that's in the work order. That's the collaboration that we're doing between the manufacturer, the trackers, and the MROs so that the airplane's not out of service very long. It's put back into service as quickly as possible. And hey, I get to fly one of my clients or customers wherever they want to go tomorrow.

On Safety Management Systems

RD Johnson

With the SMS program, we have different facets of it, but probably the biggest tool that we have is how are we communicating between the departments. Greg mentioned that we couldn't be in silos. We just can't be in silos. I have to be in concert with our quality assurance team and our maintenance team to make sure that we're providing the airplane in a ready fashion and an airworthiness fashion as quickly as possible.

When we put out a company newsletter on the safety side of the house, we're talking about what do the teams see as to reliability and what happened. What were the events that we had happen in the last month or three months?

It's the data tracking, it's the communication, and then it's the publication of how we are doing. If we don't attempt a solution set, we fail. We have to say, “Here's what we think is the best manner to do that.” And that's the communication between the teams, because an A&P is going to look at it a little bit differently than a pilot, and I'm going to look at it a little bit differently than an A&P.  Then also, the MROs got a great hand in this too, and the manufacturer. It is a big combination of how we make it better.

The best thing, overall, that we've done in safety is that we're not punitive. When I find out something, I'm not being punitive to the A&P because we hired him for a reason. I want to retain him. I just want to correct something that needs to be corrected. Then we're quite open with our partners from the FAA. We allow them to see behind the curtain at everything, so it's a great partnership across the industry.

You need a robust program. Organizations like we're at, or like JSSI or Bombardier, or Duncan, are so large that we have to have some software and some AI to assist us. We just can't track this manually. It can't be in my head. Then we have to be able to pass that down to the next guy. Let's train him or her and get them ready to work with all of our partners so that we can be as safe as possible tomorrow.

Kasey Harwick 

We employ our SMS program in a very similar manner. We have an SMS in our FBO, our flight department, and our MRO. They're pretty much in lockstep as an organization. We had developed our own reporting software, and we meet weekly to go over event reports. We are trying to continuously improve. That's the mindset we need to have. All of our team members need to feel safe in reporting. Having that just culture is very important.

When I first started 25 years ago, we would make a mistake. We'd put a squawk in the work order, we'd bring in the customer to discuss the situation, and then we correct that mistake and move on. Now we're reporting everything that we're doing in our work orders, which then reports up into our SMS system. That way, we have lessons learned, and we can track and trend that data. A lot of times, we're seeing somewhat of a lagging indicator. So we're trying to pivot where we get into more of a leading indicator.

The unique part about Duncan is that in 2023, we became a single certificate—one repair station—and it's been building up for literal decades to get to that point. But as an organization between our three MROs and our 27 AFLs [satellites] out there, we've operated under one RSGOM [repair station general operating manual]. We started implementing a form of SMS roughly 15 years ago. It has been part of who we are for the past 10,15 years, and it's gaining traction. That's the neat part.

Bill Molloy

We have implemented our SMS program across all of our facilities. Within Bombardier, safety is the first thing that we talk about at every daily management meeting that we have.  We recently brought on a new leader for our SMS program.

The objective for us is that it's all about the culture. It's all about making sure that we're looking for best practices. We're making sure that there's a threat-free environment to bringing things forward. And we're learning from those observations.

Ultimately, this is something that we are impressing upon our people. We want people to come to work for Bombardier, but we also want them to go home and have their five fingers and five toes. That's an important way of letting them know that we care about them.

I think the safety culture within Bombardier is very strong. It's fully entrenched in everything that we do on a day-to-day basis.

Greg Heine  

With Bill, Kasey, and RD, these are some of the larger organizations in our industry, and I think for a long time that there's been a push for safety and SMS systems within these organizations. But as you start looking at some of the smaller operations, that level of implementation starts going down.

It's not a blanket statement. There are really small corporate flight departments that have incredible safety programs, but it starts getting more spotty. There needs to be a push for education around the importance of it, what it means, and how it gets managed.

One of the struggles we're seeing is in that implementation. But, as time goes on, going back to the technology aspect, we can use tools to help us get this information out of our heads or out of spreadsheets and bring it to the surface. I think we can see better implementation across the whole industry.

On Whether Operators Consider SMS in MRO Choice

Kasey Harwick 

The simple answer is yes—aircraft operators are increasingly seeking MROs that have established SMS. It is becoming the industry standard. Even though it's not mandatory today, organizations that have taken the time to implement SMS or even some form of SMS show that they are very safety-conscious and they are making sure that the maintenance is of the highest quality that could possibly be. I do think that from an international side, we saw that quite a bit more. But now domestically, we're seeing that as flight departments are bringing on their SMS, we are being asked to share our event reports, our findings.

RD Johnson

It's integral to the business. One of the highlights of what I get to do is change management. When we're doing something new, it involves safety. Recently, we went to an upstart MRO, and they brought me along as the safety manager. I just watched as an operator and a safety guy to see how they were doing. I don't think they were really doing along the lines of what Bill said about keeping all their fingers and toes. When it was over, the executive V-P says, “What'd you think?” I go, “Well, they're not rookies, but they need a lot of help with SMS.”  They had great people and great ideas, but they weren't up to the standards of some of the major operations.

You can't be so interested in cost. You have to be interested in doing the right thing. And that's a culture decision. What’s your culture? What is most important? At Jet Linx, we shut down one day a year to just all talk about safety.

But when you're looking at that MRO, when I'm looking at it, are they using SMS? Is it really their culture, or are they just given some lip service? And when the executive V-P says, “What do you think?” I say, “They need a little bit of help here, and I'll be glad to help them.” 

Bill Molloy

We have a pretty strict supplier compliance document that any supplier of services or parts provider has to agree to. More recently, we have added SMS type references. We are expecting that they should have a similar type of program in place. We have a saying that we use with our people: “Bad news quickly, good decisions fast, and do the right thing.” What we're saying is that we've have to create an environment where when things don't go as planned, you can't hide those.

You have got to let the relevant stakeholders know what's happened, and then you've got to recover as quickly as you can, but you've got to do the right thing. And sometimes doing the right thing costs you more money. But if people feel comfortable that you're walking the talk, it brings it alive for people. It makes it real.

On Quality and Best Practices

Kasey Harwick 

By the way of quality, the easiest thing to do is have the established technical publication, policy, or procedure, and following that, paper manuals. I know we're all in the digital world, but as a technician, I loved having a paper copy right there in my hand. As I was doing a task, I checked them off as I went, because there were so many distractions in an MRO.

In our paint department, we created an operating procedure manual years ago, because at the time, a lot of the paint instructions weren't found in the maintenance manual. Creating that helped us align with a standard operating procedure on how we're going to conduct a paint on each make and model. Also, along the lines of quality is tool and equipment calibration, ensuring that we have a robust schedule to make sure that the tooling that we're utilizing has not drifted and that if there is a drift, we can trace back to the number of aircraft where it has been utilized.

On quality assurance audits, we have our own audit team at Duncan that routinely goes through the MROs and the AFLs to make sure that we are saying what we're doing, but also with training and certification. The more training we can have as an industry, the better off we are. Taking institutional knowledge and getting it into the new generation of technicians is huge.

We’re seeing a lot of folks that are retiring out—a lot of Charlie Taylor Awards [for 50 years of service] are being administered each year right now. And that's a lot of knowledge leaving our industry. So how do we capture that knowledge and bring it back in?

By way of training, we've created what we call the Duncan Aviation Knowledge Base, where we can query our work orders. That way, we can take those elements and not try to reinvent the wheel and not try to come up with a new way of troubleshooting. It's right there. Data is showing you this. It's really about trying to get that institutional knowledge back into the organization, out of individual hard drives or drawers, and trying to get that digitized to be able to have accessibility across the network.

Bill Molloy

It starts with the ecosystem. We pride ourselves on that if you're buying a Bombardier aircraft, Bombardier has a very robust, wholly owned network that we continue to grow.  But we also have in the likes of Duncan Aviation a very strong partner that is an extension of our ecosystem. We don't choose lightly.

As for what we're doing with employees and technicians specifically is the incubator. We brought on a lot of technicians last year, like everybody has, and we felt that a lot of them didn't survive the first couple of months because when we started to assess them, we didn't believe they hit the mark for us. So, one of the ways of moving that away from the floor is the creation of the training incubator. We are going to put our new technician starts through a robust training program for the first couple of months that they're with us so that we can assess at the end of that period whether they should go to the floor, whether they need additional training, or maybe it's not a fit. That's certainly something that we believe is going to yield good results.

The other thing we've done is we have people within our facilities now—we call them the guys with the green shirts. You'll see on the floor at Bombardier an ever-increasing number of green shirts. These guys are the floor coaches. They're helping to address any situation that comes up. They're observing to make sure that best practice is being performed. From a safety standpoint, having a look at what's being done is essential for us to instill best practices throughout our organizations.

Greg Heine  

The level of detail and how much customers focus on the quality of their data and what's being performed on their aircraft can vary. We have operators that are very in tune with everything that's being done on their aircraft and in their operation. I would say that a message to the industry is that we need more focus on compliance and quality across all operators. Really the buck stops with them.

They're responsible for the airworthiness and the operation of their aircraft. I think one of the gaps is around their reliance on some of the vendors and saying, “They're going to take care of the maintenance. We're going to be good to go.”  But sometimes they leave a facility, and they're not checking as detailed as they should to make sure everything was done. They leave and they realize, “Oh, I have an item coming due next week that wasn't in that work order. “

Vendors do a great job of trying to catch those things, but they don't always catch them. I think operators having more oversight, really getting into the details of what's going on, is really important.

From a personnel standpoint, I think the most successful organizations, those that keep their crew and their technicians, are able to transfer that knowledge and get technicians involved in the actual business of business aviation. I think that is critical. When we treat it as just “do this task, do that task” and do not give them insight into how the business operates, that's where some of these technicians are easily grabbed from our industry into other industries—when they don't have this strong connection to their organization or the industry as a whole.

RD Johnson

For quality, one of the things that we're already missing is how fatigued our people are. I don't want anyone working on or flying my airplanes that are fatigued. So how are we managing that? Just recently, I was somewhere and this person was working two shifts —six in the morning until ten at night—and they were back in the workplace at six o'clock. And I go, "What are you doing?"  It wasn't our people, and they weren't flying airplanes or working on airplanes. But I'm going, “Geez, are they giving the quality product that they need to the customer?” We can do better in our fatigue management.

The second thing is just say no. You have to be willing to say no, no matter the consequences, because no is the right thing to do. It's easy to say yes, but it's hard to say no. No is going to cause the airplane not to be ready. No's going to cause the pilot or the mechanic to have to go home and go to bed. I think it's very simple. You just have to have a culture where it's okay to lean forward and say no.