Airbus Skywise: How Etihad is installing FOMAX and its initial feedback |
| Romain Guillot in Dubai |
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28 FEB 2019 | 382 words
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© Le Journal de l'Aviation - all rights reserved |
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Etihad Airways Engineering, one of the founder members of the AMA alliance (Airbus MRO Alliance) which was launched at Le Bourget in 2017, took advantage of the MRO Middle East show in Dubai to take a detailed look back at the installation of the FOMAX (Flight Operations and MAintenance eXchanger) data collection equipment provided by Collins Aerospace.
This mechanism is one of the cornerstones of Skywise, Airbus's dedicated services platform which was developed with the assistance of Palantir, as it increases from 400 to 24 000 the number of parameters collected on Airbus single-aisle aircraft (and from 1 500 to 24 000 parameters on the A330) to supply it with data. The Abu Dhabi airline had got onboard Skywise at the start of last year, with the announcement made by Airbus at the Singapore air show.
Borja Dosal Roiz, Avionics engineer at Etihad Airways Engineering, announced that the first Etihad aircraft to be equipped with FOMAX was one of its 32 Airbus single-aisle aircraft. This is the A320 registered A6-EIR (MSN 5407) which was then grounded on 17th, 18th and 19th September last year for modification.
The addition of the FOMAX unit to the avionics bay required the installation of a certain amount of cabling, the logical setup of a dedicate breaker in the flight deck and above all the installation of GSM antennae and associated supports on a few frames after door 1L. This new 4G data link enables FOMAX to dialogue with Skywise. The unit has up to eight slots for SIM cards, four dedicated to the operator and four for Airbus.
Borja Dosal Roiz also looked back at a few specific cases which have helped Etihad to improve its operations via the Skywise platform but which do not relate, strictly speaking, to the use of predictive maintenance algorithms.
For example, he mentioned the natural emptying of oxygen bottles on the flight deck, which led to a limit margin increase of 1 100 to 1 300 psi to avoid unpleasant surprises between two maintenance inspections, the study of temperature differences in brakes on the same leg of an aircraft's main landing gear which ultimately only required the replacement of a temperature sensor or the study of the abnormal behaviour of a wing anti-ice control valve which was taking too long to open.
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Romain Guillot
Chief editor
Cofounder of Journal de l'Aviation and Alertavia
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