Soaring toward safer skies with remote engine monitoring

How Genpact's service helped GE Aerospace increase time on wing and enhance safety for thousands of aircraft

Happy and successful flight. Smiling female pilot in the aircraft , she is holding aviator headset and looking at camera. Wishes a successful fligh

Intelligent automation

Industry

Aerospace and defense

Industrial manufacturing

Services

Application and infrastructure modernization

Supply chain management

Who we worked with

GE Aerospace, a world-leading provider of jet and turboprop engines as well as integrated systems for commercial, military, business, and general aviation aircraft.

What the company needed

Improved remote monitoring and diagnostics for its 42,000 aircraft engines, generating 150,000 engine alerts and faults per year to minimize disruption, maximize time on wing, enhance passenger safety, and protect revenue.

How we helped

We partnered with GE Aerospace to provide a monitoring service to:

Monitor and prioritize alerts based on severity to avoid aircraft-on-ground (AOG) situations and in-flight events

Detect the root cause of an engine's performance deterioration

Eliminate false positives and provide technical recommendations to end customers (airlines)

Automate processes and improve abnormality detection in engine performance

What the company got

The monitoring service helped:

Avoid over 2,500 disruptions through proactive monitoring, ensuring more time on wing

Issue 24,000 proactive notifications to improve operations predictability with an 85% success rate

Reduce flight delays and AOGs, saving airlines millions of dollars each year

Challenge

Keeping on top of high-velocity, scattered data

With more than 42,000 GE engines flying around the world, an aircraft with a GE Aerospace engine takes off every two seconds. Over the course of each flight, the engine collects multiple data snapshots, generating over 480,000 data records per day. And every year, the company's engines generate 150,000 alerts and faults that must be resolved quickly and accurately to ensure engine health and performance.

But that's not all. Each engine's in-flight sensors capture over 300 parameters across flight phases and environmental conditions and then transmit the scattered data in multiple modes and formats, making the alert disposition process highly complex.

To meet its customer expectation of near-to-real-time insights on engine health and resolve maintenance issues quickly, the company needed an end-to-end service that would proactively make engine troubleshooting and maintenance seamless.

Service

Achieving gold standards in passenger safety and engine performance

Our relationship with GE Aerospace in fleet support management has been strong for nearly ten years. So, we understood the company's culture and operations well enough to dive right in.

The company's engine product line team joined forces with our remote monitoring and diagnostics squad to develop a proactive monitoring service that:

Standardizes high-velocity flight data on a bedrock of digitized message definitions and solid parsing logic to more accurately sort and solve alerts
Diagnoses the root cause of an engine's performance drop by analyzing historical data and monitoring data deviations within an hour of an alert. The monitoring operation runs 24/7
Eliminates false positives and provides technical recommendations for scheduling maintenance to end customers (airliners) on a near-to-real-time basis
Automates processes using a digital rule engine to validate engineer disposition and eliminate bias
Provides feedback loops into alert algorithms to improve abnormality detection in engine performance

Impact

Fueling more time on wing

Over the past year, Genpact's monitoring team, partnered with GE Aerospace's product line teams, has issued over 24,000 customer notification reports, alerting on-site technicians and maintenance personnel about what's wrong with the engine and recommending troubleshooting steps during the maintenance period. These monitoring services have quickly and correctly identified and helped solve engine-related performance issues with an 85% success rate. It has helped the company successfully avoid more than 2,500 disruptions through proactive monitoring that could have resulted in potential flight delays.

During this initiative, we've helped GE Aerospace identify mechanical or electronic failures before they happened, increasing an aircraft's time on wing, improving maintenance scheduling, and protecting passenger safety and the company's revenue.

In the future, we plan to leverage the same data to help improve connected enterprise operations and boost supply chain resilience with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our collaboration with GE Aerospace is a powerful example of how remote engine monitoring can help create safer skies and better businesses for engine fleet operators.