A REVOLUTION IN AIRCRAFT ELECTRICAL LOAD ANALYSIS

Airlines have an OEM/FAA compliance obligation to maintain a current electrical load analysis (ELA) for every aircraft in their respective fleets. A major airline client accomplished this by tracking every change to the electrical load using highly complex manual spreadsheets. A typical spreadsheet for a single aircraft held 100+ tabs each with hundreds of rows of data, project notes and OEM prescribed calculations. Multiply this by hundreds of aircraft and you can get a sense of the complexity at work.

Updates to an aircraft’s electrical load for changes made to an aircraft or a fleet – whether driven by Service Bulletins, Airworthiness Directives, Supplemental Type Certificates, and custom modifications (e.g. the addition of wifi, galley reconfigurations) took weeks or months to be reflected in the spreadsheets. When vendors were contracted to complete a modification, hard copy pdf documents had to be manually transposed into spreadsheets and resulted in engineering design rework. Change history was tracked but was problematic. Regular reviews were required by senior electrical engineers, specially trained in each OEM’s Electrical Load Analysis methodology.

The effort associated with managing spreadsheets represented a material cost to the business and the complexity of electrical load analysis required specialist skills and training. Other firms had been engaged to provide or develop a software application that managed ELA maintenance but failed, unable to deliver a solution that met the challenge of making ELA maintenance simple, intuitive, controlled, and transparent.