August 2021
What led to the development of ChronicX, where did you see the gap and need for this within the commercial aviation market?
ChronicX was developed in collaboration with a Canadian operator to provide an innovative approach to detecting and managing recurring defects resulting in improved aircraft health and operation. This approach leverages technology to identify and manage recurring chronic defects on any aircraft. Maintenance Control uses ChronicX, Engineering, and Reliability to manage the operator’s AOG risk and reduce unecessary maintenance actions and parts replacements by automatically uncovering previously difficult to detect recurring defects.
The recent addition of ChonicX Mobile enables maintenance technicians to see the history of defects with minimal clicks from their mobile device.
Can you explain what the product had to be able to accomplish to improve airline operations?
The cornerstone of the effectiveness of ChronicX, the reason why over 6,500 aircraft are benefitting from ChronicX today, is it identifies recurring defects using our proprietary Natural Language Processing and clustering abilities. ChronicX has spent years perfecting the algorithms that identify recurring defects from maintenance data from the operator’s M&E systems – ChronicX complements all the major M&E systems. The results are delivered in an easy-to-read and yet information-rich format used by Maintenance Control, Reliability, and Engineering to evaluate and prioritize the next steps. The impact on aircraft operations is reduced aircraft downtime and avoided delays and cancellations.
Our clients also value ChronicX’s elegant yet straightforward search defect history capabilities. There is always a story hidden in an aircraft’s log pages. ChronicX makes it easy for users to see these stories – on one aircraft or across an entire fleet. The synonym dictionaries and the advanced Boolean search capabilities take data mining to the next level. For example, a user can search for “main gear,” and ChronicX returns defects containing “main gear” and any synonym including “NLG,” “nose landing gear,” and “main gear.”
Our new ChronicX Mobile offering provides the search defect history abilities on mobile devices at the aircraft or in the hangar.
What is so special about the text-mining aspect of this product compared to other similar products?
ChronicX utilizes text mining and dictionaries of aircraft engineering synonyms to identify more valid recurring defects than other methods. ChronicX mines the freeform text in logbook entries to identify recurring defects regardless of the ATA coding of the log page and irrespective of the terms used to describe the problem. Our clients see 50% to 100% increases in the number of valid recurring defects within the first two weeks of using ChronicX.
What has been the feedback from the industry of the product?
We are thankful that all our clients are strong references. One client said this is the best tool he has seen in 15 years.
All aircraft operators have a strategic goal to improve their Reliability. Towards this goal, one of their essential objectives is to identify repeats more efficiently, quickly, and completely. Just this week, a MOC Manager said, “Our new M&E system isn’t in the same league as ChronicX….[ChronicX] is just that much more powerful for getting us quickly to the information we need to be effective.”
Another operator reduced recurring defects by 36% overall and 3 in 15s by 28% using ChronicX.
Looking to the future, what improvements are you seeking to develop for ChronicX, has there been input from operators as to what they’d like added to it
We constantly incorporate new features into ChronicX based on customer feedback. Our Custom Alert feature, Dashboards, and ChronicX of Two that identifies recurring defects on the second event are recent examples.
ATP is uniquely positioned to deliver new value streams to our clients. We see all the techlogs from over 6,500 aircraft operating around the world and under different operating models. Our clients ask us to provide them with additional insights into their aircraft health using this unique data source.
