In the run-up to the 2023 Predictive Aircraft Maintenance conference in London in November, MRO Management asked Bertrand Bianco, sales and partnerships – health management at Liebherr-Aerospace & Transportation SAS, who will be speaking at the conference, his thoughts on the landscape of predictive maintenance.

What is your assessment of the current state of predicative maintenance techniques in the MRO market?

Predictive maintenance is a fast-growing market with significant investments from all market stakeholders, being aircraft and equipment OEMs, MRO providers as well as airlines themselves.

With predictors reaching maturity and demonstrating performance and reliability, the focus seems to be shifting towards enhanced solutions integration, which should enable the growth of the adoption of predictive maintenance techniques.

On the other hand, in my opinion the biggest challenges to a wider adoption seem to be data decryption and exchange, as well as coordination with material support.

In what ways can predictive maintenance solutions lead to meaningful MRO actions?

Failures prediction tackles operational interruptions, optimises troubleshooting and allows the anticipation of line maintenance operations, such as hangar space and slots, material availability and resource management. This leads to significant maintenance savings.

Liebherr-Aerospace believes that predictive maintenance and MRO operations will develop stronger interactions over time, leading to dedicated scopes of maintenance per failure predictor. In the short-term future, we can expect that no fault found (NFF) instances may become history.

What predictive maintenance solutions do you offer and what are the key benefits for your customers?

Liebherr-Aerospace is a leading OEM, developing, manufacturing and servicing air management systems, flight controls and landing gears as well as gears, gearboxes and electronics.

We have developed capabilities in data analytics to create health management solutions for our products. They are the result of the combination of our OEM design expertise along with the in-service data and repair experience of our equipment maintenance shops.

These solutions are field-proven with selected airlines operators, and we can deploy these solutions on our service platform or in partnership with integrators.

We also develop early adopter partnerships programmes with airlines. We focus on their priorities to develop new models and we collaborate alongside their development – all the way down until the demonstration of their performance and value assessment.

To what extent do you think industry collaboration is important in moving predictive maintenance forward?

I think collaboration on data will be a key enabler for the success of predictive maintenance. The industry must look for common standards and develop a pragmatic approach that is simple to deploy by all operators.

Do you think the industry is still feeling the impact of the Covid-19 crisis in advancing predictive maintenance?

The Covid-19 crisis affected the supply chain and repair performance when market activity was at an all-time high.

Despite important demand, bringing back aircraft to service at full fleet capacity is a challenge for the whole industry.

The use of predictive maintenance as a solution to streamline costs and logistics associated with equipment removals is therefore very welcome and will allow a quicker return to profits in the airline industry.

What other challenges must be overcome for the implementation of wider predictive maintenance?

With digital and artificial intelligence technologies booming, we are seeing fierce competition to attract data scientists and other key resources in the aerospace digital landscape.

What does predictive maintenance in the MRO industry look like to you in ten years’ time?

In ten years’ time, I think predictive maintenance will be mature and fully integrated in the MRO operation system and resource planning.

It will bring an important efficiency gain on legacy aircraft operation and MRO supply chains.

Furthermore, we could see the predictive maintenance concept embedded into aircraft systems, but this would apply at the earliest for next generation aircraft to come.

This feature was first published in MRO Management – October 2023. To read the magazine in full, click here.

PREDICTIVE AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE CONFERENCE 2023

On November 27-28, MRO Management and its parent company Real Response Media will host the Predictive Aircraft Maintenance Conference 2023 at the Ham Yard Hotel in London, to explore the future of predictive maintenance, bringing together senior level executives from airlines, OEMs, MRO specialists and big data experts.

Attendees will discover how to get the best out of predictive maintenance while overcoming the greatest challenges. Case studies will highlight best practices and explore how companies are successfully collaborating with industry partners, while panel discussions will explore the major topics from the perspective of all stakeholders.

To learn more about the event and for more information on how to register, visit predictiveaircraftmaintenance.com