A Fully Connected, Data-driven Engine Delivers Precision & Performance
By Pratt & Whitney Customer Service
When it comes to engines and aircraft, big data and real-time connectivity have a profound effect on the way engine OEMs design and deliver aftermarket services and solutions.
Data-driven decision-making, by leveraging rapidly-available, high-quality data, ensures real bottom-line value to airlines and operators. It enables a much higher degree of precision and personalization to optimize performance, and helps ensure the highest dispatch availability, cost savings and extension of the life of your engine and aircraft.
Data and connectivity offer us a profound opportunity for deep learning, helping us not only monitor events in real time, but also to constantly improve how we deliver service and optimize performance. Today, data is at the heart of everything we do.
Big Data Drives Preventive Maintenance
Data profoundly affects how we plan, practise prevention and learn. Take for example, scheduled and unscheduled engine maintenance. Scheduled maintenance intervals, which prove to be highly accurate, are based on historical data. In P&WC’s case, deep knowledge from big data has culminated from the nearly 100,000 engines we've delivered (60,000 engines in service)--not to mention the 800,000,000 cumulative flight hours that we collect data from.
With full-flight data coming from prognostics systems like our FAST™ solution and our Oil Analysis Technology in the final stages of development, true predictive and preventive maintenance, including tailored on-condition maintenance programs, is possible. It has given us the ability to be knowledgeable, with a high degree of accuracy, about what is happening inside an engine without intrusive inspections. We are well aware in advance of any potential event. In many cases, what might have once resulted in unscheduled maintenance can now potentially be minimized or avoided entirely through our ability to capture and analyze key engine and aircraft data parameters in (nearly) real time.
When decisions are made based on timely and relevant data and deep engine expertise, the notion of operating in a 100% planned maintenance environment is not something that's part of the distant future, but truly a close reality.
Empowerment Through Data: the Future is Now
Imagine the following scenarios:
Scenario 1
While you are piloting a regional turboprop, the FAST™ solution is capturing full-flight engine and aircraft data, which is wirelessly sent to the P&WC data centre for analysis after you shut down the engine. Within 15 minutes, your airline’s flight operations centre receives the results and acts on them, say for example, by dispatching a needed part.
Scenario 2
You are an operator on the business aviation side. P&WC’s Digital Engine Services Team conducts a daily review of any maintenance events captured and analysed through the FAST™ solution. For any events deemed urgent, P&WC alerts you by phone on the next steps you will need to take, with a fully prepared logistics plan.
These types of scenarios are already starting to happen. What’s more, the knowledge gained from the FAST™ data can be cascaded into new engine designs to help further increase availability, performance and operability.
Find out more about P&WC’s FAST™ solution makes propeller balancing much simpler and more accurate or watch the Connected Engine video below.
Your Opportunity to Tell Us What You Think
With our technology, we’re all ears when your engines talk, so too do we listen carefully when you talk. Subscribers of ProPilot will receive a message from the magazine inviting them to participate in the annual engine powerplant survey. We hope you’ll take the time to complete the survey and provide your thoughts. For more information on ProPilot Magazine, click here. Thanks for making your voice heard.
Photo courtesy of Air Team Images and Pratt & Whitney Canada
