‘When we started out on this journey 40 years ago nobody thought about transitioning maintenance records,’ says Anton Tams, SVP & Manager Fleet Support at GECAS. At that time the only records that usually went with an aircraft were statuses and certificates. Some things change. Buy a Boeing 787 or an Airbus A350 today, for example, and chances are you’ll only receive electronic records. But buy yourself a 2000 vintage 737 and you could find it still comes with 100 boxes of paper.

With close to 4,000 commercial aircraft transitions last year and the number continuing to grow in line with the expansion of the world’s fleet, the leasing industry has been increasingly anxious to find a better way of exchanging maintenance data and records between operators.

Anton Tams, SVP & Manager Fleet Support at GECAS: 'It may not be perfect, but it's pretty damned good, and we're trying to encourage everybody using records to read and write to this standard.'

A number of years ago the main lessors realised that first and foremost they would need to agree with their customers on what exactly they would give and what they would receive back on each transition. ‘Amazingly, there was almost nothing written down about which records would be moved at an aircraft transition,’ Tams said. ‘There was lots written down about what national authorities will keep and work on but nothing as to what would move across a border with an aircraft. It has been evolving over time, but it’s never been written down. So that was the first pillar we needed to establish.’

The first step in this process was to engage with the ICAO. Even though lessors are not regulated by the organisaton, it was receptive to their ideas as it, too, had been thinking about the possible benefits of digital records. As a result, it agreed to modify its Airworthiness Manual Doc 9760. When originally drafted in 1947there was no consideration given to transitions between operators not involving a change of ownership at the same time. Now a definition of a lease has been put into 9760, along with the definition of a transition and what records a national authority should give and/or get from a regulatory perspective.

With those loose ends addressed, the ICAO then sought to agree with lessors, through the AWG, and with airlines, through IATA, the additional commercial elements the leasing community needed.

With that in place the ICAO then launched the Aircraft Transfer Records Working Group, bringing together representatives of their regulated airlines and national authorities to look at the acceptance of electronic records and to promulgate them. ‘This was precisely what we wanted,’ Tams explained. ‘ Our objective was to obtain equal status for paper and electronic records, for them to be treated the same.

‘We found people were happy to take paper documents at face value, as they had always done. But if we tried to give them electronic records, or even scanned documents as pdfs, they wanted to know what system had been used to produce them and what controls were in place. They didn’t ask those questions about a paper system, even though they are equally germane to both. So we were looking for a mechanism which said it doesn’t matter whether it’s paper or electronic, what matters is the content.’

After three years of work the ICAO’s working group produced a document that sends a clear message to national authorities that the only way of maintaining, let alone enhancing, the industry’s exceptional safety record is through the adoption of electronic records. ‘For us, as financial entities, it means we can now point to that guidance material and say categorically to our customers “Here is what we need to give you and we should be able to give it to you electronically,”’ Tams explained.

The third pillar required was a mechanism by which records could be transferred using a standard language for exchanging electronic records. That was done in co-operation with the American airlines group, ATA, which has a strong track record in developing various industry standards, with the engagement of airlines, OEMs, software companies and lessors. The result is Spec2500. ‘You can think of Spec2500 as a glossary of terms written in XML – a series of words with the parameters that go with them, including a definition of the aircraft, name, type, model etc,’ said Tams.

‘From our perspective as a lessor, all we need to do is move the records. For an airline, whether they get the records on paper or electronically, they need to go through them, they need to read them, and they need to take the information into their maintenance and engineering system, assuming they have one, which most big airlines do. And to do that they have to type all the information into the system, whether they get the data on paper or on pdf. We estimate that doing that alone represents a cost of around $35,000 per transition,’ said Tams.

‘We recognised that if we did Spec2500 just for the records there would be no value for the airline in this and therefore no reason for them to buy into it,’ he continued. So in addition to putting in the records Spec2500 also allows the input of data. Take something very simple, like a “Last Done, Next Due” overhaul listing, for example. Spec2500 allows you to provide the data and then at the end include a link to the signed record.

‘Then theoretically – we haven’t yet done it – if you’re an AMOS (M&E software) customer, for example, and you’re redelivering the aircraft you can export this data and the records in Spec2500 to us, as the lessor, and we can then hand it to the next customer. And if they, in turn, are Spec2500 compliant they will be able to read that file, read the data and insert it in the right place in their system.’

Available from ATA for $300 and free to members, Spec2500 may not quite be ‘open source’ but can certainly be seen as ‘open domain’. The challenge now, said Tams, is to promulgate it as a global standard. ‘It may not be perfect, but it’s pretty damned good, and we’re trying to encourage everybody using records to read and write to this standard,’ he added.

Three big software companies dominate the aircraft M&E record keeping market, Boeing’s AerData with its Stream product; GE Aviation’s AirVault, which has a basic product and a new Asset Transfer System (ATS), and FLYdocs, in which Lufthansa Technik is the majority stakeholder. Between them these three providers account for around 90 per cent of that market. Stream and AirVault are already fully Spec2500 compliant. FLYdocs is also compliant, already receiving real-time data feeds from leading M&E systems. Its Marketing Manager, Nomsa Sibanda, told Aviation Finance: ‘FLYdocs is already partially compliant as we have a number of clients receiving Spec2500 standard data feeds into FLYdocs to support asset transitions and day-to-day compliance tasks. We are actively working towards full compliance and it’s a priority in our product roadmap.’

GECAS has itself recently adopted AirVault’s ATS and used Spec2500 to transfer to it 3.5 million files, 11 terabytes of data related to some 4,000 aircraft and engines assets. It took about 40 hours to produce the files over one weekend and about six days to read them in ATS, with a further two months of follow up and checking.

‘When we wrote the spec we were thinking about one aircraft, two engines and a landing gear, or maybe a package of five engines, in an electronic crate. Spec2500 was never designed to move 4,000 assets in one go – but it did it. So we’ve proved it is pretty good,’ Tams said with understandable pride.

Looking to the future, Tams said: ‘Our view as a lessor is that more and more airlines are going electronic and less and less are going to find it acceptable for a lessor to turn up to rummage through their records on their site, which is what lessors have done traditionally ahead of a transition.

‘Lessors came into the market to bring flexibility and growth, so it does not make sense that as an industry our contracts should still require our customers to provide paper records. By insisting on that we’re actually impeding the progress of more progressive airlines.’

One of the big outstanding challenges for lessors, therefore, will be facilitating the needs of early adopter airlines such as easyJet, which is fully integrated and has just implemented electronic signatures, with those of another airline is still using paper, and in particular managing the transitioning of records between the two.

‘At GECAS our policy is going to be to offer everybody the records electronically. For us, if they were paper originally that means pdf forms which have been scanned, and we can export them in various different ways. So if someone actually needs paper, we’re going to have to print that out and get it re-stamped,’ Tams said.

Unquestionably the transition from paper to digital is not going to be without some difficulties, but Tams is confident it will be relatively smooth. ‘We took back an aircraft from India recently, scanned all the records, put them in our record system and did all the preparation work electronically, and that has been redelivered in Europe with an airline which has not taken the paper. We’ve successfully delivered three or four aircraft at this stage with electronic records and all aspects of the acceptance done on line.’

So from a technical perspective, it can be seen as ‘job done’. The final hurdle, however, and a potentially big one, is that of mindset within the industry. ‘To be honest, within the industry there is a mindset at the moment that you can’t go wrong if you keep the paper,’ Tams said.

This difficulty partly relates to age. The people making decisions on transitions, both within leasing companies and working as outside contractors advising airlines on acceptances, are, as one might hope, extremely knowledgeable and experienced. And those are both attributes that usually come with age. It is a simple fact of life that people who grew up in a pre-digital era are more reluctant to reply on the trustworthiness and reliability of digital data than those who grew up in a digital one.

‘Our immediate challenge is to change the mindset of the contractor population. We need to drive more of the software vendors to adopt the Spec2500 standard, and further consultation is required with national authorities around the world,’ Tams said. ‘But I have no doubt that the value to the industry, both in terms of efficiency and safety, will accelerate momentum over time.’