Aero & Defense Manufacturing: Full Flight Engine Data Management in AWS

Challenge

An American multinational Aerospace and Defense conglomerate that is one of the world’s largest aerospace, intelligence services providers, and defense manufacturers by revenue and market capitalization. This subsidiary company is a world leader in designing, manufacturing, and servicing aircraft engines and auxiliary power units.​

The primary systems used to manage jet engine data, including 1500 parameters captured across total flights globally, required modernization. With the anticipated increased volume of engines, the explosion of full-flight engine data, and the need to improve on-wing time and reduce AOGs, projects were initiated to transform engine data management using AWS Gov Cloud as the primary technology stack.​

Solution

• Use of a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) approach to build data management and digital thread solutions iteratively using multiple Scrum/Sprint teams​
• Ingest, transform and store full flight engine data from aircraft to AWS​
• Analytics / data science applications enabling airline customers and engineers to analyze engine performance​
• Automated data pipelines​
• AWS Glue, Redshift, S3, Lambda, API Gateway, ​
• Route53, Secrets Manager, Jenkins​

Outcome

Transformative digital solutions that form the core of their full flight engine data management and analytics processes for the next 20 years to effectively:​

• Optimize engine maintenance, asset health management, engine repairs, airline engine data visibility processes for the most advanced engine fleet worldwide​
• Improve engine utilization and on-wing time and reduce MRO work on engines​
• Provide advanced analytics​
• Support “power by the hour” business model