A door plug falling off a pressurized aircraft such as a Boeing 737 Max 9 presents a potential disaster. The vacuum created can suck out a cabin’s contents, including passengers and crew out of an aircraft. Thankfully, nobody was hurt when such an incident occurred during an Alaska Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon on January 5, 2024.
The incident led US regulator the FAA grounding 171 737 Max 9s in Alaska’s fleet and 79 in United Airlines. Investigators subsequently discovered installation issues with the door plug – bolts that needed tightening were not. Door plugs are placed where there is an emergency exit on aircraft so they can carry more passengers.
United Airlines’ technical operations teams worked to remedy the situation to get their aircraft back into the air. Alaska Airlines was also able to find and fix the loose hardware.
Karan Talati, co-founder and CEO at manufacturing management software company First Resonance says, “With Boeing, there are a few things at play, and there is an ongoing investigation.
“The door and its assembly was produced in Malaysia. The problem is not the location – it is that if you have a diverse supply base, you need traceability systems to capture every data point for the repair and maintenance of the aircraft. Without traceability, it can take months to reverse engineer information and retrieve data that was not traceable from the start.”
The Alaska Airlines incident shows how important parts traceability is to maintaining and operating a safe airline. Traceability is the capability to track and document the history, location, and usage of various components, materials and processes throughout the entire lifecycle of an aircraft or of an aerospace product.
Chris Markou, head of technical operations at airline association IATA says, “Traceability involves creating a systematic record of information that allows for the identification of each part’s origin, manufacturing, suppliers, operational and maintenance history, and any modifications or repairs.”
Ensuring airworthiness
Traceability is a vital part of airworthiness, enabling all stakeholders and regulators to ensure a part is safe and know which activities have been undertaken on a part. It also allows engineers to check that defined processes and manuals have been followed. Airworthiness certificates can be checked to verify safety, reliability, and assure quality. “Traceability is vital for accident and incident investigations and targeted recalls,” Markou explains.
Traceability is also crucial for ensuring that an aircraft is fully maintained. Back-to-birth (BtB) traceability ensures that there is proper documentation available, which is often required by many stakeholders. Part inventories are critical to keeping aircraft fleets in the air. This means that there is a prerequisite for recording maintenance and repairs to protect the asset value of a part and of the aircraft itself.
There is a growing need to find and deliver efficiency improvements in supply chain visibility and transparency to reduce or avoid risk and maintain integrity. These risks include the presence of counterfeit or unauthorized parts in the supply chain. Another change driving traceability is digitalization in other parts of the aerospace development process – concepts such as digital thread or twin, blockchain and the use of data analytics.
AS 9100 for traceability
The AS 9100 standard emphasizes traceability throughout the entire aerospace supply chain. Talati says, “It requires organizations to establish and maintain processes for tracking the product throughout its lifecycle, from design and production to delivery and service.”
However, Talati believes that AS 9100 is insufficient for aerospace companies, which need to capture and analyze more data to achieve quality control. He says, “To stay competitive, companies must layer on top of these quality management standards the ability to analyze data and detect problems automatically.”
The latest technology for part identification in use is RFID. Louis Emile Lammertyn, European Middle East and Asia product manager for part compliance and identification firm Brady Corporation says, “Every part has a birth record that is stored in a database, and each is then labeled to enable access to that information, either via a barcode scan or via RFID signals.”
Aerospace companies must comply with international regulations and aircraft OEM requirements. Without mandatory and correct identification, it is not possible to assemble parts into an aircraft.
A key part of this is ATA Spec 2000, a set of data exchange standards that governs how data about parts is shared. ATA Spec 2000 creates a common part language suitable for use in the global supply chains of the aerospace sector. A recent update to the standards has led to a modification in the RFID traceability technology used in aerospace.
Thomas Henneboehl, a strategic account manager for aerospace at Brady says, “RFID labels have been used since 2014 to enable visibility on traceability information for multiple parts within range of any RFID reader.
“Three types of RFID chips were in use – Multiple Record, Dual Record, and Single Record. Today, the Multi Record RFID chip, which enables the recording of all part events on the part itself, is no longer necessary and no longer supported by the ATA Spec 2000. Infrastructure can retrieve relevant data from databases via the part’s RFID label.”
Yet he admits that not every aircraft part can be identified with RFID technology. Hydraulic tubes, for example, are identified with serial numbers and barcodes. Though the technology differs, the process is very much the same. Barcodes are scanned to see or transfer the information to the corresponding database location.
Digital tools & automation
Parts traceability technology is becoming more automated. Waseem Ahmed Khan, senior industry analyst for aerospace and defense at consultants Frost & Sullivan believes the most important trend for traceability remains the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT), because of the benefits of predictive maintenance.
However, at present, Khan says RFID is being used by Boeing at more than 25 facilities to monitor parts inventory: “The issue with RFID is that it produces a lot of waste material which makes it less attractive in aerospace as companies look for new ways to foster sustainability in their operations.”
Khan adds that e-commerce platform such as Honeywell’s GoDirect Trade, which uses blockchain technology could disrupt the market for buying and selling aircraft parts where the bulk of trades are still done offline. “Boeing has added more than US$1 billion in excess airplane parts to GoDirect Trade,” he says.
Information and operations technologies have improved over several decades through innovations such as model based design and engineering, digital twins, artificial intelligence, blockchain or distributed ledgers believes Lee Annecchino, executive vice president and global aerospace and defense leader at consultants Capgemini.
AI can help automate the inspection and validation of documents, making the traceability process more efficient, and resulting in increased productivity levels. He also believes that cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) are having a positive impact.
“AWS is creating better digital continuity in the aerospace industry by creating a centralized digital platform which securely stores, and which collects the historical information of each part,” says Annecchino.
Fundamental twins
While Khan suggests that traceability is not fundamental to concepts like digital thread and digital twin in aerospace engineering and manufacturing, Annecchino points out that Capgemini’s report about digital twins reveals that the majority of players in the aerospace and defense sectors are planning to implement the technology.
“The implementation of digital twins is led by an acknowledgment of the multitude of potential benefits, from significant cost savings to reduced time to market, increased sales, improved operational efficiency, technological advancement,” says Annecchino.
Digital twins require the latest data and precise and accurate information about the information they represent. In the absence of the latest data, experiments or tests that use model-based methodologies are invalid.
Nevertheless, Markou believes that traceability is a foundational element in the implementation of digital twin concepts in aerospace engineering and manufacturing: “Traceability ensures data integrity, compliance, and efficient management of the entire product lifecycle.”
New technologies that link the physical part to its records will continue to improve parts traceability and improve recycling. These technologies include blockchain, IoT, Auto-IDs such as RFID, QR codes, barcodes, laser etching and marking, digital twins, AI and machine learning, augmented reality, advanced data analytics, supply chain digitization, and federated or decentralized techniques for data exchanges.
With all of these technologies, the need for improved cybersecurity to protect the access, transfer, and integrity of traceability data becomes vital. Traceability has many roles to play, but at its core is a need to protect traceability data to ensure that it is reliable and not tampered with.
Using blockchain for parts tracking
The use of blockchain technologies in aerospace supply chains is being investigated by aircraft OEMS and suppliers. However, Thomas Henneboehl from Brady believes that information about component safety and security is already being shared efficiently. Blockchain could also help create common traceability standards for stakeholders, leading to increased efficiency, accuracy and security of information.
Chris Markou from IATA says, “Projects to explore the potential of blockchain in parts tracking and traceability often involve partnerships between OEMs, suppliers, airlines, and technology providers. IATA is working on an EASA study to assess the implementation of blockchain in airworthiness management for aviation.”
Markou believes blockchain technology offers several appealing features for aerospace parts tracking, including an immutable ledger to ensure the integrity of information – an absolute must for parts traceability and supply chain transparency.
To enable enhanced transparency and to reduce the risk of fraud, counterfeiting, or errors in the tracking process, blockchains are decentralized on a distributed ledger. They use smart contracts to automate various processes, such as triggering notifications or the updating of records when certain conditions are met – streamlining traceability.
Case Study: Taking Traceability to the moon
Four years ago in December 2020, Agile Space Industries won a contract to build 12 attitude control thrusters to guide the Griffin Lander, led by Astrobotic to the south pole of the moon in search of water. The landing was originally planned for late 2023, but is now expected to reach there in November 2024. The Lander will carry NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover). It’s the USA’s first mission of its kind to that particular region of the moon.
First Resonance, which provides manufacturing management software Ion was bought in to help Agile capture and manage build data for customer deliverables. First Resonance developed an in-house stack of tools to record build progress but the solution wasn’t easily scalable, and the team was quickly growing – making it more complex.
To address this challenge, First Resonance’s CEO and co-founder Karan Talati used Ion to provide granular traceability on process and part information down to the level of who performed an action and when it occurred. The software can track everything from the powder feedstock for 3D printers to hot-fire test data from its rockets.
The platform makes it possible to grow the team without losing institutional knowledge and for issues to be resolved and parts sourced efficiently, helping to ensure that the company ships high quality products. It can also efficiently share information with the supply chain, operations, manufacturing and production departments. Agile estimates savings of US$17,000 in engineering hours within the first year of implementing Ion – not including the time and quality savings with as-built bills of materials and cites that one of the greatest benefits is that engineers can now concentrate on achieving other key performance indicators
