Airlines Beginning Lean Initiatives in Maintenance and Flight Operations

Some airlines are beginning to take steps to "lean" their maintenance and flight operations, but there is much more that can be done.  This was an important theme of the Lean Flight Initiative 2007 conference held in Dublin last month.

"Lean" is a concept that originated at Toyota's automobile manufacturing facilities, with the idea to make its processes more efficient by removing unnecessary steps.  And it worked.  When Toyota moved from mass production to a Lean model, the numbers were staggering, with at least a two-to-one performance improvement in many key areas: the number of defects per 100 cars went from 200 to 75 and the number of direct hours spent on assembly dropped to 11 from 25.

Now some are bringing this concept to airline processes, and it seems to be working there as well. According to Carmine Romano, an American Airlines vice president in charge of its Tulsa maintenance base, and a keynote speaker at the conference, American began using Lean principles in 2003 as part of a plan to reduce maintenance costs.  It succeeded in reducing the turnaround time required for a major check of its MD80s from 24 days to 12 along with a corresponding 50 percent reduction in costs, Mr. Romano claimed.

This seems impressive, and other airlines are taking notice.  Boeing's Susan Larson, who manages its Commercial Aviation Services Lean Promotion Office, told the conference that other airlines such as El Al, Alaska and Qantas - as well as American - have been using its Lean consulting services, and they talk in terms of halving many of their maintenance process requirements such as space, equipment, engineering hours, other effort and inventory.

Still, the airline industry has taken only small steps with Lean up to now - mostly in maintenance. But some are beginning to apply Lean in other areas such as flight operations, and much of that is focused on EFB (electronic flight bag) applications.

According to Steve Hardgrave, the CEO and co-founder of Aircraft Management Technologies (AMT), many flight operations functions are largely paper-based and inefficient.  AMT conducts workshops with airlines to examine this issue, which have indicated that they could save $100,000 to $200,000 per aircraft per year by using EFBs that optimize Lean principles.  (Note: AMT is a co-founder of the Lean Flight Initiative.)

AMT's Flightman covers a range of flight-operation functions that can benefit pilots, flight attendants and maintenance engineers to third party ground personnel and management.  With the help of Rockwell Collins, which is also committed to Lean Flight, the technology has already been implemented by Singapore Airlines and Skybus, a U.S. start-up low-cost carrier that wants to base its operations on Lean principles from its beginning.

Captain K Senguttuvan, Singapore Airlines' deputy chief pilot for its B-777 fleet, summarized the significance of EFB technology and its relationship to the Lean initiative, by saying that EFBs need to do more than just eliminate paper; they should eliminate waste in terms of transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction and defects.  And talking about Singapore's own efforts in this regard, he said. "We are already seeing the benefits of it; we will see the full benefits after it is fully implemented in 2008."

More information on the Lean Flight Initiative 2007 conference can be found at http://www.leanflightinitiative.com/site/conf_presentations2007.asp.

An interview with Steve Hardgrave discussing EFB technology can be viewed at http://www.flightman.com/site/efbinterview.asp.  05-21-2007.

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