Virgin Atlantic Latest Airline to Opt for Boeing's Airplane Health Management

Virgin Atlantic Airways will use Boeing's AHM (airplane health management) system to monitor the in-flight condition of its thirteen B-747-400s, becoming the latest in a growing list of airlines to adopt the maintenance technology.  Virgin also said it would work with Boeing on developing "sustainable" biofuels suitable for commercial jet engines.

As with other airlines, Virgin Atlantic will use AHM to gather and evaluate in-flight data in real time to identify faults, but also to appraise fuel-burn information to determine when and how fuel is be wasted.

As for faults being discovered during flight, the ability of AHM to give an early notification to ground personnel so that scheduled turnaround times can be met, and potential delays and passenger inconvenience avoided, has proven its worth to using airlines, Boeing says.

AHM also provides aggregated fleet-wide information among cooperating operators, which can be used or several proactive purposes including the ability to determine effectiveness of particular maintenance actions in fixing problems.  08-16-2007.

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