Virgin Atlantic is to test a radio frequency
identification tagging system for tracking parts used in aircraft
maintenance and repair at its Heathrow Airport store.
Virgin Atlantic will take delivery of the next-generation Airbus
A380 in 2008, and the project will assess how RFID technology,
which is used during the aircraft's manufacture, could also help to
improve maintenance.
Mark Butler, systems implementation manager at Virgin Atlantic,
said, "We are interested in the supply chain, materials management
and are looking for efficiency gains."
The project will investigate the possibility of reducing stock
levels. Butler said the airline wanted to reduce the number of
high-value components it kept in store. "At the moment we rely on
staff to update our Ultramain engineering management system," he
said.
Butler will look at how RFID technology can help Virgin to
comply with Civil Aviation Authority and International Air
Transport Association regulations, which require airlines to
provide proof of the legitimacy and history of aircraft
components.
Last year Airbus and Boeing announced plans to develop a single
RFID specification for RFID tags used within the aircraft supply
chain.
However, Butler has concerns about how RFID technology will work
in commercial airline maintenance.
Aircraft components are often shipped in metal crates and stored
in metal cages, which can disrupt radio signals. The pilot project
aims to show whether the UHF tags will be be effective under these
conditions.
Butler is also concerned about EU regulations relating to the
bandwidth used by UHF-based tags. "EU regulation is more stringent
than the US," he said.
The risk, he said, was that readers may not be able to read tags
coming from US aircraft manufacturer Boeing.
Virgin Atlantic has hired Tata Consulting Services (TCS) to
develop software for the three-month trial, commencing in
September, to assess how RFID could be used to record information
about aircraft components.
The trial will involve an interface between the Ultramain
system, which runs Virgin's engineering operations, and software
being developed by TCS to capture information read from RFID tags
and recorded on an Oracle database. The software will be based on
Oracle's 10g database, Fusion Middleware, Edge Server and
Application Server 10g. It will be run on a Windows 2003
server.
Butler is evaluating two makes of wireless RFID reader - Symbol
and MaxID - and is in discussion with Printronix about RFID printer
options. TCS is developing the user interface that will run on the
reader.
The trial will involve building a wireless local area network in
the aircraft stores to enable data captured by the RFID systems to
be transmitted to the TCS application.