THE PROBLEM
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.
THE CLIENT BENEFIT
Realtime visibility of every aircraft in the fleet and a complete aircraft change history and confidence the airline is in compliance with regulators and the OEM.
Reduction in the time and effort to setup the ELA for an aircraft entering into service
Reduction in the cycle time for an ELA update. Documentation and meetings were made redundant by the application workflow. Accountability was delegated to Avionics and Interiors engineers and even potential vendors to author projects, test the impact of different designs and receive design approval.
Reduction in Engineering time spent updating ELAs, releasing Electrical Engineers who previously updated project ELAs for days and weeks to do more value-added work.
THE SEATEC SOLUTION
SeaTec was given the challenge of developing an application that could:
- Ingest large volumes of data (millions of individual electrical load values) from multiple OEM aircraft baselines and unique customer modified formats for newly inducted to decades old aircraft
- Codify the 1000’s of calculations unique to each OEM, fleet type and sub-fleet type
- Support individual configurations required to re produce OEM analysis
- Provide intelligent validation and error checking to enable continuous real time analysis of modifications being affected
- Ensure usability so that technicians and engineers not trained in OEM ELA could understand and use the application without reliance on wiring diagrams, spreadsheets and senior electrical engineer guidance
- Incorporate design guidance that simplified the design process and reduced the time taken to design review and approve a modification
A rigorous analysis of OEM and customer data, user experience, and customer processes was conducted. A plan encompassing development, testing, DER review, data migration, validation, and change management resulted in the successful adoption of the ELA Manager or ELAM by the airline customer.
Learn More – Visit our ELA Manager Page for more information.
Wayne Crosbie
Senior Consultant
Transportation
