Airline operating cost reduction through enhanced engine health analytics

Abstract

Engine Health Management (EHM) is a comprehensive maintenance service offered by engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney (PW) to its airline customers. In its current form, engine performance is monitored through recorded physical metrics, such as gas temperature, pressure, and altitude, taken as single snapshots at various phases of flight. The advent of the Enhanced Flight Data Acquisition, Storage and Transmission (eFASTTM) system, which allows for near-continuous recording of engine metrics, provides Full-Flight Data Analytics (FFDA) that may proactively alert and recommend maintenance activity to airlines. Adopting eFASTTM may help avoid Adverse Operational Events (AOE) caused by unexpected engine failures and the associated cost burdens. With respect to operating cost, airlines standardly report Cost Per Available Seat Mile (CASM) and Cost Per Block Hour (CBH). EHM services that prevent operational disruptions can help airlines reduce these unit-cost metrics, whose scrutiny by industry analysts affect investment guidance, stock performance, and overall business outlook. In this study, the value of FFDA services to airlines is investigated on the International Aero Engines V2500, a mature engine with customers' operational histories well-documented. Using a Poisson distribution to model the occurrence of six operational disruption types-Inflight Shutdown, Aircraft-On-Ground, Aborted Takeoff, Air Turn-Back, Ground Turn-Back, and Delay/Cancellation-the cost savings potential is quantified as a function of events avoided by a hypothetical FFDA service. Airline Form 41 financial data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics is then used to estimate the magnitude of savings on CASM and CBH retroactively for 2012-16. Results show that unit cost reductions of 0.5% to 1.5% are possible through engine event avoidance, representing savings up to $104M annually, but outcomes are highly dependent on assumptions about cost of operational disruptions for each individual carrier. Overall, a baseline model and procedure is developed for valuating FFDA and associated EHM services. Further collaboration between airlines and Pratt & Whitney on data availability and accuracy will help refine this model, which is the first to bridge publicly available airline costs with engine history data, helping stakeholders transition to an eFASTTM ecosystem that promises greater operational efficiency and safety.