Parts Start Talking

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagging of aircraft parts has long held promise to save costs by improving inventory management, supply-chain efficiency and maintenance operations. Promises and predictions, however, have often failed to materialize.

But RFID may finally be getting real. Several carriers, including American Airlines, are using automatic identification technology to tag parts. Boeing leads a venture offering RFID retrofits on parts from any OEM. Lufthansa Technik will offer tags developed and used internally to outside parties. And Airbus is both applying RFID in shops and preparing for extensive tagging on the A350 XWB.

Progress followed improvement in technology, especially tags and readers, and agreement on RFID standards, including ATA Spec 2000. But to fully realize RFID’s potential, several more hurdles must still be overcome.

OEMs, airlines, shops and parts distributors must install equipment, which is not terribly expensive, but also change processes, often a much bigger headache. Many airlines are stretched for cash and smaller firms in every segment will need help in adopting RFID.

That is one reason the Boeing-Fujitsu partnership, RFID Integrated Solutions, offers a turnkey solution, says general manager Phil Coop. Turnkey includes low- and high-memory RFID tags and Contact Memory Buttons (CMBs), readers, software and middleware, training, integration into maintenance applications and advice on changing maintenance processes.

Integrated Solutions will initially cover cabin emergency equipment, rotables, repairables, airframe damage and cabin interiors. The partners will eventually extend much more widely. Fujitsu and other firms provide hardware and software, while Boeing does integration.

Maintenance History   

RFID tags will provide authoritative maintenance history on emergency equipment and be ancillary documents for other parts, Coop said. Tags can contain birth records, repair and certification history, actions taken, time-on-shelf and no fault founds, supporting decision-making by mechanics. Boeing estimates RFID will reduce touch time on parts by ten percent over their lifecycle. “And if you have 200,000 parts in inventory, you will know how many are in revenue service,” Coop said. Much of the industry’s $47 billion in inventory is now unaccounted for.

Tags may be read-only or read-write, which allows techs to note maintenance history. CMBs can even store digital photos of damage. Integrated Solutions is now doing testing with Alaska Airlines. Coop is discussing it with 16 carriers and several engine manufacturers.

The program is based on common industry standards. “We wanted to make sure anyone can read tags on their devices,” Coop said. Integrated Solutions provides airlines with installation kits. “They clean the surface, stick the tags on and test to ensure adhesion during checks.” The process adds man-hours, but does not lengthen the check. The Alaska tests are checking for tag durability under stress, for example being next to vigorous riveting. 

Normal RFID tags for supply chains store only 96 to 128 bits, said Toshiya Sato, general manager for Global Solutions in Fujitsu’s Intelligent Society Unit. “We developed a high-memory tag that stores 64 kilobytes, so customers can store all maintenance history in a tag.”

In June, Integrated Solutions tested tags on Alaska’s parked aircraft. In October come tests in flight and a release for emergency equipment and rotables is set for November.

Sato sees several OEMs interested in the solution, including suppliers for the 787. Fujitsu is also discussing the solution with maintenance shops.

Read ranges depend on tag, but the standard is three to five meters, sufficient for mechanics to scan life vests by walking down the aisle. Read-write distances have lengthened considerably in the last five years. Filtering the data has not been difficult. “We put more than 2,000 tags on one aircraft with no problem scanning all the data on them,” Sato said. Eventually, Fujitsu wants to collect tag data in data centers and share it through cloud computing. 

MacSema makes CMBs that American is putting on replaceable parts of doors, stabilizers, rudders and elevators of Boeing 737s and 777s. The only manufacturer of aviation-certified CMBs, MacSema is now a partner in Integrated Solutions.

Denis Boulet, MacSema vice president corporate business development, says the choice between RFID and CMB depends on space available, part type, environmental conditions, access and other factors. CMBs must be touched for reading or writing, but are extremely rugged and can store much more data, up to 4 gigabytes.

The range of Integrated Solutions’ Motorola readers depends on power. Local regulation set both allowable power and frequency, said Mike Maris, senior director for transport logistics at Motorola. “You do not want to read at too long a distance, because that lights up everything,” Maris says. “Then there is more for the middleware to filter.” He argues that reading at three to four feet is ideal. Readers can read throughmany materials, but have trouble with moisture, such as pallets of water bottles.

Maris said union concerns may hamper RFID deployment and small firms adopt slowly due to upfront costs. Nevertheless, “adaptation will come along, as insurance companies see improvements in safety from control of parts and big OEMs like Boeing and Airbus adopt it.”

Optimizing Logisitics 

Lufthansa Technik (LHT) introduced RFID tagging to optimize logistics in warehouses in 2006 and now tags 80,000 parts moving 200,000 times a year. Project manager Tom Burian said tags were put on paper documents that accompany parts. “Now we will permanently fix tags on parts.”

Paper tagging was done on serialized parts, but all parts will get permanent tags. LHT will start with emergency equipment then slowly move to other parts. Emergency equipment is an attractive start point because so many must be inspected frequently on each plane. “It’s the low-hanging fruit,” Burian said.

Tagging documents reduced logistics time—the time from removal to availability in the right back-shop for repair —by 70 percent. Burian expects tagging of life vests to cut inspection time from 30 to 45 minutes to five minutes. “It’s a good business case,” he said.

One challenge was making tags that work on metal and can survive harsh environments for long periods. LHT developed its own read-write RFID tag and had it certified as airworthy. The tag stores 512 bits, but LHT is working on a high-memory version. Read range is 30 centimeters. “We offer the tags to other companies now, and may offer services,” Burian said. “We could do tagging or send teams to install tags.”

Open Standards 

Aviation took longer to develop standards than other industries because it wanted open standards. Burian predicts these open standards will be better in the long run.
The LHT manager sees great advantages in uniform OEM tagging of parts at birth. “They have so many different standards for nameplates, and these are modified and can be hard to read. And RFID can be read without line of sight, so you do not have to open up a panel, just point the reader.”

No one doubts the promise. It’s reality that has been frustrating. “RFID was always like the next gas station,” joked Ed Wodarski, vice president solutions at Servigistics. “There were lots of pilots, but it never happened.”

Wodarski sees a huge opportunity for RFID to improve maintenance work. “You bring in a landing gear and split it into many pieces that must be brought back together because airlines want their own parts on their landing gears. RFID can track where parts are and what has been done to them.”

But MRO shops are unforgiving. Unlike the clean rooms used by pharmaceutical firms for RFID, shops have metal walls, girders and plenty of concrete, bins and containers. “It’s very challenging to deploy, its works best in facilities designed for RFID,” Wodarski said.

That is another reason RFID usually starts with emergency equipment, which is kept on aircraft and never gets too hot or too cold. It is also easier to put RFID tags on plastic parts. But putting RFID on life vests will not change the MRO business.

The biggest potential gains are in maintenance shops, which are tough physically and behaviorally. “Maintenance is a very conservative business. They want to talk to three people who have done it before they do it,” Wodarski said.

Nevertheless, as major airframers tag more parts, he sees opportunities in the aftermarket. “It’s fun to think of the aftermarket tail wagging the dog, but when the dog is Boeing or Airbus, that doesn’t work.”

Another big dog is definitely starting to bark. Airbus has chosen a holistic lifecycle program that can be implemented by airframe and engine manufacturers, their suppliers, maintenance shops and airlines, according to Carlo Nizam, head of value chain visibility and auto-identification at Airbus. The approach uses both active and passive RFID, as well a traditional barcodes, and has been piloted at TAP Maintenance & Engineering, the MRO arm of TAP Portuguese Airlines.

The TAP project is expected to reduce idle and lost parts, manual searches and production disruption to reap benefits of €14 million ($19 million) over five years. Additional projects are under way at five other companies, including airlines, suppliers and MROs.

Nizam emphasized the Airbus program uses a range of RFID enablers on various assets such as aircraft parts, logistics containers, tools and large aircraft sections to achieve full automated visibility of operations. Airbus considered, but chose not to use, CMBs. “As RFID became more robust, we did not need CMBs,” Nizam explained. “CMBs cannot be read at distance, they need a different type of reader, and there are very few suppliers.”

Airbus will have permanent tags on 3,000 parts of each A350 XWB. Suppliers can put together their own systems of tags, writers, readers and software that meet Airbus requirements. Airbus will also offer a complete RFID package, including software, integration and support by OATSystems and CSC. Data structure will comply with ATA Spec 2000, reader interfaces with ISO standards and robustness with SAE AS5678. All standards will be open.

Some A350 suppliers have already chosen Airbus’s package. “We have been focusing on A350 suppliers so far, but as the program matures we will start working more closely with airlines and MROs,” Nizam said.

The Airbus manager acknowledges it is easier to implement RFID in a clean-sheet shop or warehouse, but it can also work in older facilities. “We have implemented it in all-metal shops and gotten 99% read rates, with both fixed and mobile readers.”

On prospects for adoption, Nizam argues that the enablers, technology and standards, are ready. Only people and processes must be changed. “We need some success stories and we need to reach critical mass,” he said.

RFID will go through stages: awareness, education, acceptance and deployment. “Our A350 suppliers are in deployment now,” Nizam said.

At least one sector, the makers of maintenance software, is eager to get going. “It will improve accuracy and save time,” said Chris Reed, managing director of Trax. “I hope it is coming, but we want to see it before we believe it. We cannot finalize software until it is real.”