Airbus SE sealed a five-year agreement with British carrier easyJet, which will adopt the OEM’s Skywise data platform for predictive maintenance services across its fleet of nearly 300 aircraft.
Skywise will allow easyJet’s engineers to intervene and replace parts prior to component failure, reducing service delays or cancellations.
easyJet is a London-based low-cost carrier with 820 routes serving more than 30 countries. Its fleet consists entirely of Airbus narrow-body aircraft (totaling nearly 200 A319s, A320s, and A320neos, plus orders in place for a total of 140 A320, A320neo, and A321neo jets.)
The new technologies and systems will be in place on easyJet’s fleet by summer 2019.
The Skywise program was introduced last June by Airbus in collaboration with Palantir Technologies (a big-data analytics firm) and promises to be a single-reference database for use by “major aviation players” to improve operational performance and business results, and to support "digital transformation."
It collects aviation data from multiple sources across the industry into one cloud-based platform, including work orders, spares consumption, components data, aircraft / fleet configuration, on-board sensor data, and flight schedules.
For easyJet, Airbus noted Skywise will provide predictive maintenance services by drawing on platform trials that allowed easyJet engineers to remove components before faults occurred, limiting delays and cancellations.
Skywise also will analyze data from other components on easyJet aircraft thanks to Airbus’ new flight operations and maintenance exchanger, called FOMAX, “which collects 60-times more data than existing systems,” according to the OEM.
