"We want to capture every parameter, from every engine, every second."
Matthew Bromberg
Jet engine maker Pratt and Whitney is harnessing big data to try to cut down on engine maintenance problems, and save airlines money.
If you’re a frequent flier, Lynn Fraga, an analytics manager for Pratt and Whitney, has a scenario that might make you wince: “You’ve planned your vacation, you’re on the aircraft, you’re on the tarmac and you’re next in line for takeoff. The pilot’s about to power up that engine, and then comes on the PA to say he has a maintenance alert in the cockpit, and you have to return to the gate.”
Fraga wants that kind of "unplanned maintenance event" to become a thing of the past — or at least much rarer than it is now. Pratt has partnered with IBM, investing in new technology that allows it to monitor and analyze all of its engines in real time, even in flight.
“We want to capture every parameter, from every engine, every second,” said Matthew Bromberg. He’s Pratt’s president of Aftermarket — that’s all of the maintenance services the company offers to airlines once they’ve bought an engine.
Bromberg said Pratt has always collected some data about the performance of its engines, but soon it will go way beyond basic things like temperature, pressure, vibration and rotational speeds.
“Today we capture roughly 100 parameters per engine. Tomorrow, 5,000 parameters can be measured and captured,” Bromberg said. The systems won’t go live until the end of this year, but Bromberg said that so far their models have proved 90 percent accurate at predicting problems before they occur, and he said they hope to be able to cut unplanned maintenance by at least 50 percent.
“A model that’s that accurate means we can go in, with operators that are willing, and anticipate these events, do the on-wing inspection, and prevent it from happening,” Bromberg said.
What’s made this possible, and made Pratt’s technological investment a good business decision, is the convergence of two factors.
First, there's simply the ability to be able to gather and manage what will be an unthinkably huge amount of data — 12 petabytes a year. A petabyte is a thousand terabytes.
“I do think there’s a convergence of technology that does enable us to move quicker into big data,” said Chief Information Officer Larry Volz. The company signed an agreement with IBM in June of last year.
Second, the company is at what it describes as an inflection point. Right now, it has fewer engines in service than at any time in the last twenty years, as its installed base has declined to about 12,000. But as Pratt has launched its new, fuel-efficient geared turbofan engine, airlines have bought in, big time. Pratt has a backlog of orders that’s greater than its entire installed fleet. In other words, its maintenance business is about to grow a whole lot larger.
Aftermarket is crucially important for Pratt. In fact, it’s where the company makes most of its money, and Bromberg said that instead of waiting for airlines to come looking for services on an ad hoc basis, the company is now moving to long-term service agreements, where the manufacturer is responsible for all of the management of an engine after it’s installed.
That will make the efficiency that big data can bring all the more important.
