S1000DTIPPING POINT

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S1000D’SADOPTIONTRAJECTORY

THE IMPLICATIONS FOR S1000D MAINSTREAMING

MAKING S1000D WORK FOR AIRLINEOPERATORS

AIRLINES REACH THE

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2 Air l ines Reach the S1000D Tipping Point

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Airlines Reach the Tipping PointS1000D

The Context

S1000D’s Adoption Trajectory

5 The Next Wave ATA Fleets go S1000D

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The Implications for S1000D Mainstreaming for Airlines

Making S1000D Work for Airline Operators

3FLATIRONS SOLUTIONS

The Context

Decades after its adoption as a de facto standard in the Defense industry, the S1000D specification for aircraft maintenance information is poised to move beyond “new generation” fleets like the Boeing 787, Airbus A350, Airbus A220 (formerly the Bombardier C Series), and Boeing 777X. A recent communication by Airbus gave notice to airline customers that S1000D will soon be offered for its ATA fleets, with an end to iSpec 2200 deliveries in 2022. Publishing in two specifications simply doesn’t make sense, and airline customers have glimpsed

to implement proprietary best practices for improved asset utilization and maintenance pro-ductivity. Doing this work using S1000D at a vastly greater scale will involve many operational and infrastructure changes, as well as new approaches for managing airline information in an eEnabled age.

the improved capabilities brought by S1000D content (improved content relevance and flexibility) through their exposure to new generation aircraft and their Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled engines and components.

The impact of this expected change has broad implications for airline operators, particularly those that rely on the internal revision of their maintenance and operating manuals and work cards as a lever for competitive differentiation. Customer Originated Changes (COCs) to OEM maintenance content are performed by many airlines (and virtually all the largest and most dominant carriers) to implement

4 Air l ines Reach the S1000D Tipping Point

S1000D’s Adoption Trajectory in Airlines

in this specification. Having seen the benefits of S1000D in new programs (both for OEMs and operator customers), airframe manufacturers are increasingly finding ways to upgrade their tech pubs to S1000D as part of the investment undertaken for major program overhauls.4. Mainstay Program Migration: The coexistence of S1000D and iSpec 2200 brings inefficiencies for both OEMs and Operators. For the manufacturing community, authoring (or rendering) the same content in multiple specifications means cost, latency, and the potential for error. For operators, it means a different content experience of maintenance engineer end-users – one decidedly “book” oriented, the other more flexible based on the specific needs of the task being performed. Airbus recently announced their intention to migrate the bulk of their ATA fleets (including A320, A330, A340, and A380 product families) to S1000D. The migration process by Airbus is intended to be a non-disruptive one, with a period of dual-spec publishing for those operators who prefer ATA iSpec 2200. However, the current plan Airbus envisions a pure S1000D model by 2022. With this single move, a huge portion of the tails in service will be S1000D-managed, and it is likely that Boeing and other airframe OEMs will soon follow suit. This change marks the single biggest catalyst for driving S1000D to widespread adoption by virtually all airlines operating at scale in coming years.5. Flight Ops Moving to Spec 2300: Flight Ops, a tech pubs domain that has long resisted full-scale adoption of XML, has at last made moves beyond OEM proprietary XML formats (and just as commonly, the use of semi-structured or unstructured content) into Spec 2300. Spec 2300 is an emerging specification whose architectural principles are fundamentally the same as those that underpin S1000D. OEMs are increasingly producing Spec 2300 as part of contract commitments, and airlines have responded favorably to the enhanced capabilities that Spec 2300 bring – which like S1000D, include greater content personalization and contextual relevance.

1. Early Airline Adopters: A Flatirons CORENA Fleet customer was the first airline to adopt an S1000D-based technical publications solution in 2005. At that time, there were no S1000D fleets yet in service – however, the airline saw the potential of S1000D to improve author productivity through component-level reuse, dynamic publications, and improved maintenance productivity through more relevant content. This early adopter used S1000D despite continuing to receive iSpec 2200 SGML from OEMs through a series of transformations that converted the inbound ATA content into S1000D – not just once, but with each new OEM revision.2. New Programs: As airframe OEMs became more and more program managers and system integrators relying on a broad-based partner ecosystem, S1000D became the de facto standard for all new programs, including the Boeing 787, Airbus A350, Airbus A220 (formerly the Bombardier C Series), and even the COMAC C919. Aside from manufacturing adoption drivers, the complexity of these increasingly eEnabled aircraft made S1000D a much better vehicle for distributing technical information. With its support for 3D media, interactive process data modules, and increased integration / navigation of data across doc and manuals types, S1000D was ideally suited to elevate the capabilities of tech pubs to match those of the aircraft they supported.3. Refreshed Programs: All-new aircraft programs involve investments of tens of billions of dollars, and entail tremendous risk. Increasingly the major airframe OEMs are looking to do incremental updates to existing, successful programs through engine, avionics, winglet, and composite structure upgrades. Programs like the Boeing 777X have taken the opportunity provided by a program refresh do migrate their program to the S1000D specification, requiring component supplier partners to provide their tech pubs to Boeing

While S1000D has been a mainstay of OEM technical

publications for many years, both defense

and civilian, it has seen a much slower ramp-up in airlines,

in part due to the still nature of new

generation aircraft. There are some

useful data points that demonstrate the

upward trajectory of S1000D adoption, which seems poised

to see usage for even legacy ATA fleets (and thus, tens of

thousands of aircraft in operation) in the

next 3-5 years.

THE NEXT WAVEATA Fleets go S1000D

Based on these and other factors, the slow but steady rise of S1000D in the commercial airline space seems to be accelerating. Airlines who want to “surf” this wave rather than be engulfed by it will need to be aware of its implications –

both the opportunities and the challenges.

5FLATIRONS SOLUTIONS

6 Air l ines Reach the S1000D Tipping Point

The IoT revolution for aviation brings strong benefits to operators in terms of greater levels of aircraft utilization, lower incidences of unplanned equipment failures, and greater return on their aircraft investment overall. For OEMs, there are also obvious benefits that include improved insight on how equipment is used in the field, how it performs relative to design parameters, and how engineering changes can be directed toward addressing unanticipated issues.

The move to S1000D-based technical information is part of a larger evolution by OEMs to evolve their product capabilities and maintenance support using eEnablement, prognostics, and big data analytics. More personalized and contextually relevant tech pubs (enabled by S1000D) are really an enabler of this, allowing support personnel to have more personalized instructions following an observed or predicted condition.

The Implications for S1000D Mainstreaming for Airlines

7FLATIRONS SOLUTIONS

2. Migration of Customer Originated Changes: Large airlines, typically those with more than a couple hundred aircraft in service, employ internal authoring teams or external service partners to implement Customer Originated Changes, either to more rapidly reflect OEM or regulatory guidance, or to apply proprietary changes that have been shown to improve efficiency, utilization, or safety. For many of these airlines, the cumulative value of these investments in COCs is millions or tens of millions of dollars. They are part of the airline’s DNA and help them to deliver a differentiating level of service to their passengers, and to their investors.

However, these technology-driven benefits come at a potential cost for airlines. The change from a hardware driven model to a blended software / hardware IoT platform (and associated tech pubs flexibility, supported by S1000D) entails new challenges for airlines, including:

1. Potential for loss of airline control: For decades, airlines have considered their operational data a proprietary asset, used to help them analyze and refine their maintenance and operations in ways that provide competitive differentiation and greater efficiency. The IoT and S1000D evolutions overtaking the industry today pose a potential threat to this model by:

Predictive and prognostic tools provided by OEMs often re-assert access by the manufacturer to operational data, allowing them to share insights that the airline may otherwise consider confidential. In the past, many airlines wanted compensation for sharing this type of data. With today’s internet-connected assets, sharing it is the implicit price for more informed engineering changes and more advanced insight into potential maintenance or repair issues. While the benefits are potentially strong, they remove a “lever” for competitive differentiation between airlines seeking to out-perform each other operationally by creating a common denominator across all airlines using the product.

The inclusion of Onboard Maintenance Terminals (OMTs) and Maintenance Laptops as part of the standard configuration of some new generation aircraft creates a new complexity for airlines who want to maintain full control over their tech pubs revision cycle. By integrating an OEM-controlled device that hosts the latest approved manufacturer-approved tech pubs on-board the aircraft itself, manufacturers have potentially created a barrier to operator control over tech pubs. Content load into these aircraft-mounted maintenance terminals may be difficult by design, with data loads being subjected to the same approval processes as aircraft software / component firmware, creating a disincentive to revise in-house. In response, some airlines have disabled these onboard maintenance terminal devices.

DILUTING AIRLINE “OWNERSHIP”OF OPERATIONAL DATA:

POTENTIAL FOR BARRIERS TO AIRLINE REVISION OF MAINTENANCE MANUALS:

8 Air l ines Reach the S1000D Tipping Point

3. Change Management support across the enterprise: Since S1000D has been at the margins of aircraft operations and maintenance until recently, it has not been the subject of a full change management effort in many cases. Shifting the remaining ATA fleets over to S1000D in the years to come will entail training and support, particularly for more senior staff (for whom the conventions of ATA formatted content is deeply in-grained). Some of the groups that will need to be a special focus include:

AUTHORS: CONTENT REVIEWERS/APPROVERSCONTENT END-USERS:

Primarily maintenance engineers, work planners, and others on the forefront of aircraft maintenance execution. Looking at task-related information outside the context of a “book” representation (with rigidly defined chapters and sections), and adopting a more digital-first mindset when accessing this information, will require training and adjustment for some of the more experienced staff.

Content authors moving from iSpec 2200 SGML to S1000D XML may have the most difficult change management challenge. S1000D is designed for component-level content reuse and assembly of these components into both standard and ad hoc publications based on the need at hand. Writing for component-level reusability is a skill unfamiliar to many authors, and one that will require change management support. Aside from this, there is the more obvious need for syntactic training to teach authors the conventions of writing valid S1000D XML.

As with the other user groups described, reviewers and approvers – the domain experts who review a change for its technical accuracy and clarity – will also need to make adjustments to account for the less monolithic nature of S1000D content relative to ATA iSpec 2200. This means, among other things, being able to review a new data module component both in-context of one or more assembled publications and in stand-alone form – ensuring that the content is presented in a clear way that is reusable.

While the focus of this white paper has been the impact of the S1000D mainstreaming on airline operations, airlines aren’t alone in having to adapt to this industry-wide change. As mentioned previously, OEMs are still navigating this transition. While larger OEMs have largely built out their S1000D publishing infrastructure (technology, in-house resources, and third-party authoring service providers), hundreds of smaller component OEMs are only now coming to terms with S1000D and the changes it entails to their product delivery and support process.

9FLATIRONS SOLUTIONS

After decades of slow, incremental progress for S1000D in civil commercial aviation, the S1000D “revolution” is at last upon us. S1000D is now poised to impact aircraft families that number 10s of thousands of tails – not just the new generation aircraft that have been slowly entering service in recent years.

For airlines, this accelerating change will present both challenges and opportunities. Finding the right balance of OEM collaboration and data independence / self-sufficiency may not be an easy path for some, but it has the potential to transform the effectiveness of maintenance personnel, and the ROI of the aircraft investment over its long service lifecycle.

Flatirons has been helping airlines and OEMs to navigate the complex technical information management landscape for more than 25 years. With the world’s only OEM-independent solution that supports for new generation fleets like A350, 787, and A220/C-Series as well as ATA iSpec 2200 fleets, we are ideally positioned to help operators smoothly transition their mainstay fleets and associated tech pubs COCs to S1000D. By providing single-system, mobile access for maintainers, we help airlines turn their technical content into a tool for competitive differentiation. We invite you to contact us for a consultation on how your airline operation can benefit from the S1000D revolution that’s underway!

Making S1000D Workfor Airline Operators

10 Air l ines Reach the S1000D Tipping Point

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Get started now!We invite you to contact us for a consultation on

how your airline operation can benefit from the S1000D revolution that’s underway!

Citations / Referenced Works

Flatirons knows the importance of clearly delivering the right information, at the right time, to the right people.

TURNING CONTENTINTO KNOWLEDGE®

Flatirons Solutions® provides solutions for content lifecycle management for large asset industries like aviation, defense, rail, and marine. For more than 25 years, it has helped manufacturers, operators, and military forces maintain and operate complex assets more effectively. Its software and service solutions help organizations to deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right people — Turning Content into KnowledgeTM.

info@flatironssolutions.com+1 303 544 0514 (Americas)

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