In the air, helping pilots to locate situation-sensitive information in a matter of seconds can make the difference between life and death. On the ground, enabling pilots, maintenance crews and flight operations personnel to find the exact information they need, when they need it, can create significant cost savings for airlines.

The problem is that the information that your crews need to do their jobs is spread across unconnected systems in dozens of documents—flight manuals, flight operations manuals, maintenance manuals, maintenance records, captain’s logs, change orders, FAA directives, NOTAMs, and flight procedures just to name a few. That’s why leading airlines increasingly rely on Mark Logic to help them integrate content from across their enterprise and deliver situation-sensitive content to the people who need it, whether they’re in the air or on the ground.

Dynamic Enterprise Publishing for Operations Documentation

Management and delivery of operations documentation is a significant challenge because of the sheer diversity, volume, and volatility of the documents. The need for regulatory approval exacerbates these challenges because of increasing pressure from agencies such as the FAA, EASA, and DoD, who are demanding greater efficiency in the review and approval process, as well as more rapid processing of updates to airline crews.

Traditionally airlines have approached their operations documentation with an inefficient mix of authoring tools (eg, Word), desktop publishing (eg, Quark), and static delivery of documents (eg, PDF), with a “one size fits all” approach. This approach to operations documentation makes management and processing of updates complex, time consuming, and difficult to audit.

Dynamic Enterprise Publishing for Operations Documentation significantly reduces the cost and complexity of creating, managing, and approving operations documentation. This reduction in cost and complexity means greater operational efficiency, easier demonstration of compliance with regulatory agencies, and a lower total cost of ownership.

Electronic Flight Bags

By combining storage, updates, search, and display capabilities in a single, lightweight technology, MarkLogic Server is the ideal technology for electronic delivery of operations manuals to the pilot on the flight deck.

Federal regulations and airline policies and procedures require pilots to have access to an immense and wide ranging set of documentation in the cockpit. These include flight manuals, flight operations manuals and a host of other logs, guides and notices. In paper form, all of this put together in a pilot’s flight bag can weigh 60 pounds or more. Worse, the sheer volume of this information makes it virtually impossible for pilots to find the specific information they need to respond to in-flight situations in real time.

That’s why airlines such as Jet Blue and United are turning to Mark Logic to help them equip pilots with electronic flight bags (EFB) that provide them with the situation-specific information they need, when they need it. Mark Logic integrates all the content of a flight bag into a single repository that leverages the content’s XML structure as well as its text. MarkLogic Server’s content assembly and content delivery capabilities then enable pilots to specify situational context such as tail number, phase of flight and aircraft type, and retrieve the situation-specific information they need in a matter seconds. The EFB itself can be built into the cockpit control panel, or loaded into a laptop or other device carried by the pilot.

Air and Ground Crew Portals

Operations documentation isn’t just for the cockpit – it’s for all the airline communities who collaborate to ensure safety and efficiency in the operation of the airline. By providing for storage, updates, search, and display of operations content that is dynamic and contextual to a user’s needs, MarkLogic Server acts as the heart of your operations documentation delivery systems.

Many airlines are now seeing the value of equipping maintenance, engineering and flight operations personnel on the ground with powerful content applications to increase operational efficiency. For example, InfoTrust Group embeds Mark Logic technology in its software products to XML-enable the information management systems it develops specifically for the aviation industry. Its suite of products let airlines receive, manage and deliver information to the hangar floor, engineers and operations groups.

Similarly, airlines such as United are further leveraging their content by using MarkLogic Server to make information contained in EFBs available to pilots, flight operations personnel and maintenance crews on the ground. This allows pilots to complete their pre-flight preparations more efficiently while maintenance crews are able to diagnose and fix problems much faster.